No matter where you are on the political spectrum, the midterm elections produced one incontrovertible fact — there are more women in Congress than ever before.

That doesn’t mean it’s time to break the sisterhood sweaters out of mothballs. Though almost 20 percent of the House and Senate members will be women, that number is nowhere close to matching women’s 51 percent share of the U.S. population.

And compared with the rest of the world, the number is still paltry. Reaching that milestone of just under 20 percent hoisted us all the way up to … 85th in the world.

What does it mean to be 85th in the world? It means that the U.S. is tied with San Marino, also know as the Most Serene Republic of San Marino. That 24-square-mile microstate has a population of about 30,000 and is completely surrounded by Italy.

Ahead of the U.S. — in many cases, way ahead — are 99 countries, most of them no bastions of progressive thought about the rights of women. They include Zimbabwe, Honduras, Kazakhstan, China, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Tunisia, Cuba, Iraq, Sudan, Bosnia, Eritrea and Saudi Arabia.

For decades, women have shared a goal of being better represented in legislative bodies and other positions of leadership. There’s been progress, but it hasn’t always meant better laws for women. Just as women are every bit as capable as men to hold public office, they’re equally capable of doing a lousy job.

The main reason the United States has so few women legislators is that not many women run for office, and they are more skeptical about being recruited. When they do, the experts say, they win at about the same rate as men who run for comparable offices.

The reasons women don’t run for office are important. No. 1, the nation remains basically family unfriendly, still unable to muster support for women in substantial ways that make it easier for them to leave home to rejoin the work force after having children.

For instance, the persistent wage gap between men and women (which remains at roughly 77 cents for women for every $1 a man is paid), the nearly 40 percent of private-sector workers who don’t have paid sick days and the overall lack of paid family and medical leave for many employees.

There’s more. There’s the egregious absence of good child care and early educational opportunities particularly for the poor and working class, and the United States’ singular distinction as the only country in the advanced, industrialized world that does not universally offer paid leave to parents after the birth of a child.

Those are significant hurdles. The odd thing is that too many women, having achieved office, don’t aggressively work to reduce the hurdles for their sisters. For example, in 2013, in her first year in Congress, Rep. Ann Wagner, a Missouri Republican, voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act because it added protections for LGBT people, Native Americans and immigrants.

There are also institutional barriers that face women seeking to advance into leadership and political positions. Incumbency, for instance. Sitting legislators don’t like to move, and their positions alone make it particularly difficult to dislodge them. Along with the seat goes the money needed to campaign for re-election or election to a higher office.

Women sometimes bring problems on themselves. Studies show they set a bar of excellence for themselves that is unreasonably high and worry more than men do that they are unqualified to hold office. Jennifer Lawless, professor of government and director of the Women & Politics Institute at American University, says women are more likely than men not to run for office when they doubt their qualifications.

“Women are held back by their own self-doubts, and men don’t care,” Lawless says.

Of course, women should not be the only gender in office that cares about so-called “women’s issues.” Ghettoizing concerns that frequently are championed by women is one way to get men to back off those issues.

They shouldn’t. It’s in the interest of both genders to strengthen families and to work toward income equality and better educational opportunities. We’d also add reproductive choice, but there are women’s issues that have nothing to do with abortion.

Many of the newly elected crop of women legislators aren’t going to work on behalf of those issues. Certainly the handgun-toting, hog-castrating new Republican senator from Iowa, Joni Ernst, won’t. While there are things to admire about Ernst — chiefly her career in the Iowa National Guard — her political know-how and grasp of current events are not among them.

Maybe that’s what progress for women in politics in the United States looks like. Before there was Ernst, Reps. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, and Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., showed the country that you don’t have to be Superwoman to hold elected office.

Kathleen Dolan, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, says there is “almost no evidence at all” that voters look at gender first when making their decisions. Philosophy and party affiliation matter most. The recent election looks like it proves the point.

Editorial by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch