According to the latest update of data maintained by the Center for American Women and Politics, more than 600 women of color are now serving in state legislatures nationwide, an all-time high.
"At the end of 2020, women of color constituted 7.4% of the total 7,383 state legislators in the country, and they now currently are 8.2%," Chelsea Hill, CAWP data services manager, said.
CAWP is a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, and it turns out that the data collection effort's home base is performing much better than the national numbers.
Of the 36 women among New Jersey's 120 members of the state Senate and Assembly, 19 are women of color, six of them in the Senate and the other 13 in the Assembly.