One of my mentors was Patricia Schroeder, and one night she came to me on the floor and she said to me, "Why are we sitting in Congress, when a lot of women would try to do it and couldn't? Why are we here and others aren't?" And I thought back and said it was because my father believed in me and she said the same thing, she said her father believed in her and thought she could do anything.

I believe very strongly in paid sick leave.

I think that changing stereotypes and attitudes, it takes time. As we progress and we have more women astronauts and more women in construction sites and everything else, then we're making progress. Discrimination is deeply embedded in our community, but we do have the tools to combat it.

The reports that Media Matters have done about sexism in our society and really the mainstream media called Hillary Clinton "castrating," they called her the B word, they called her all kinds of horrible things. And I think in a sense that it raised the awareness in our country, so that we can have a national discussion about it.

The original feminists wanted two things. They wanted the right to vote, from which we could work to get more equality. And we have made progress. We did pass the anti-discrimination law, Title 7, Title 9, equality in the workplace, equality in education and in sports and in all these other areas. But enforcement is very hard. Changing stereotypes is very hard.

Women deserve the same permanent rights and explicit protections given men in the Constitution.

While men's rights are guaranteed by specific language in the Constitution, women's equal rights aren't mentioned.