( CNN ) -- I almost always get asked the same question : How can it possibly be the `` end of men '' when there are so few female elected officials -- when men still hold the reins of political power ? It 's an excellent question . Until now , I 've answered by pointing to statistical trends and future projections . Always , I ask people to take a leap of faith . But after this election , I feel like I am on so much more solid ground . The women 's vote did not turn out to be historic in the way pundits predicted before the election . Yes , more women voted for President Obama , but not in record numbers . The gender gap was in fact a little smaller in this election than in 2008 . Yes , women were important in certain states , but so were young people , African-Americans and Latinos , who , together , make up Obama 's new winning coalition . What 's more , women did not even constitute a unified vote . Married women tended to vote for Romney , while single women went for Obama . What changed in this election was that women accumulated power in a calm and measured way , and began to look for the first time much less like outsiders to the political process . New Hampshire , arguably a state populated by the greatest concentration of political insiders and obsessives , gave us our first ever matriarchy -- a delegation of House , Senate and governor that is entirely female . We elected a record number of women to the Senate . One of those new senators is Elizabeth Warren , who over the rest of her career has the potential to embody women 's transition from outsider status to right in the thick of things . What about the `` war on women , '' the constantly mutating arguments over reproductive rights ? On this , women won handily . In Missouri , Democrat Claire McCaskill ran against Todd Akin , who claimed that in `` legitimate rape '' the female body shuts down pregnancy . McCaskill not only beat Akin , she trounced him , winning by 16 points . Before the election , when McCaskill was still behind in the polls , women looked beleaguered and marginalized , subjected to lectures by men about their internal plumbing . Afterward , it 's those who did the lecturing who seem like fringe , marginalized characters . In fact , practically all the candidates with the improbable Akin-type theories lost . ( Check out this scorecard on Jezebel for a complete accounting . ) Once , not all that long ago , women seemed like newcomers to the political scene , alien to its settled ways . Women were scrutinized in their every public move as though they were a newly discovered species . Think back to Hillary Clinton 's presidential campaign . Could she be tough enough on China ? Soft enough to cry ? Would she wear red suits to all her big speeches ? If so , what did that mean ? Now that the sight of a woman in a roomful of senators is becoming less unusual , our analysis becomes much less crude . Debates about image and optics are ceding to debates about actual policies . We also realize that women come in all types . More are likely to vote Democratic . Among female voters , more than 50 % tend to favor abortion rights . Akin , for example , split the vote among white women . Minnesota Republican Michele Bachmann , who is strongly pro-life , kept her seat . Just as men have wide varieties of views , so do women . Voting as a bloc is something you only do if you 're disenfranchised . Voting the way you want is a sign that you 're gaining power . The important thing is for women to participate in the political process and speak for themselves . Workplace studies from the 1970s showed that when women reached a third of an office population , their presence no longer seemed unusual . The Senate will be one-fifth female . We 're not there yet , but we 're getting close . In this election , people are still discussing historic firsts -- the first openly lesbian senator ( Democrat Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin ) , the first Asian-American woman ( Democrat Mazie Hirono of Hawaii ) . Slowly , over time , we want these firsts to fade away and for female senators to be elected without that fact alone constituting a news story . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Hanna Rosin .
Hanna ##n : The women 's vote did not turn out to be historic in this election . Anna : But for the first time , women feel less like outsiders in the political process . For example , we elected a record number of women to the Senate , she says . Rosin : We will debate less about women 's image and more about their actual policies .