“Is it possible that Congress would get more done if there were more women in Congress?” President Obama asked recently. Then he answered: “I think it’s fair to say. That is almost guaranteed.”

There’s no “almost” about it. Without a doubt, Congress would be a better place with more female members. Of course, women can be fierce partisan warriors (see Bachmann, Michele, and Pelosi, Nancy), but they often bring to the political process a sense of decency and a respect for others that is grievously lacking in their male colleagues.

One striking example: The female members of the Senate (now 12 Democrats and five Republicans) meet privately for dinner once a month. These days they can seem like renegade soldiers, meeting secretly in no-man’s-land under a truce flag while rival armies dig deeper trenches and hurl more incendiary invectives at each other.

”We are all a team as women,” Sen. Olympia Snowe, a Maine Republican, told CNN’s Dana Bash. “We may not agree on every issue, but that’s not the point. We know how to work together in the give-and-take of it and achieve results.”