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GOP candidates Christine O'Donnell, Sharron Angle and Nikki Haley have captured the attention of the country this election season, but they're just a few of the record number of women pursuing office this year.

More than 160 women congressional and gubernatorial candidates won their primaries and will be on the ballot next week, leading some observers to dub 2010 the "Year of the Woman."

This year's record-breaking numbers are encouraging, but deceiving, said Siobhan "Sam" Bennett, president of the Women's Campaign Forum.

"We're ranked 90th in the world in the number of women in elected office. We trail behind Cuba and Afghanistan," she said, citing data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union on the percentage of women in national parliaments.

"[People] look at Hillary Clinton's run for Congress. She's secretary of state. They look at [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi and say, 'Oh, we got there! We have parity,' " Bennett said. "Nothing could be further from the truth."

Bennett worries that for the first time in more than 30 years, we'll see a backslide in the percentage of women in Congress, particularly among Democrats.

Democrats are expected to lose seats in the House and Senate, and the female lawmakers in office are overwhelmingly Democratic.

There are 13 Democratic women in the Senate, compared to just four Republican women. In the House, there are 56 women who are Democrats and 17 who are Republicans.

"The deeper problem underneath all this is we do not have a pipeline or a bench of women prepared to step up and run for the inevitable number of women that we are going to lose this cycle," added Bennett, who was the Democratic nominee for Pennsylvania's 15th District in 2008.

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don't like that the women are republicans, and they don't want the GOP to win that victory.

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