The campaign to get a woman on the $20 bill is picking up steam

More than 72,000 people have voted in the online poll of 15 potential replacements for Jackson, including Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, and Sojourner Truth (the full list is available here.) Ades says the competition has narrowed to a “very close race” but won’t say who’s in the lead.

“We stuck very closely to this rubric of evaluating every candidate by the breadth of their impact: how transformational was their contribution?” Ades explained. “And the other factor we asked people to consider were ‘what were the challenges these people faced?’”

The idea of getting a woman on the $20 started when Ades’ fellow organizer Barbara Ortiz Howard realized one day that her daughter had no everyday reminders of famous women in history. “Part of the mission, besides getting a woman on the $20 bill, is to educate as many people as possible about as many women as possible,” Ades says. “We want to see how many people we can reach.”