Story highlights Gayle Tzemach Lemmon: The chances for securing stability and building peace grow when women are included.

The new Women, Peace, and Security Act of 2017 is an important step in the right direction, she writes

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon is a CNN contributor and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is the author of "Ashley's War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield." The opinions expressed in this commentary are hers.

(CNN) This week saw a great deal of discussion about America's wars. But less has been said about its peace. And in an era of partisan rancor in which precious little wins over both Republicans and Democrats, legislation pushing to put one group in particular at the negotiating table managed to win bipartisan support: Women.

Indeed, President Trump recently signed into law the Women, Peace, and Security Act of 2017 -- a bill years in the making backed by Republicans and Democrats alike that aims to strengthen, support and promote the role of women in peace talks and post-war stability. The idea -- backed by data-led research -- is that when women are part of the discussions to end the fighting, wars are more likely to stay ended. And to bring a just peace that includes all the population, not just half.

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

This is a good idea, not just because half the population should have a say as their country fights for its future. The chances for securing stability and building peace grow when women are included. A study conducted by the International Peace Institute found that peace agreements are more likely to last at least 15 years when women are included in the process.

Women are often the canary in the coal mine when it comes to security: Two years ago -- months before US military officials began speaking about the role of ISIS in Afghanistan and years before the "mother of all bombs" got dropped, Wazhma Frogh -- a civil society leader and women's rights activist who is now part of her country's High Peace Council -- wrote to tell me about ISIS leafleting in Nangarhar. Frogh told me that women activists in the area had written to say that extremism was taking hold in their neighborhood, with little to stop it.

But despite their presence on the front lines of extremism, peace talks have stubbornly excluded women. As Jamille Bigio wrote recently in Newsweek: " between 1992 and 2011 , women were fewer than 4% of signatories to peace agreements and 9% of negotiators." The most recent talks on Syria's future have included no women at all.

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