Hillary: Sexism or Self-Sabotage?

There were gender issues at play in Clinton's Presidential run, but they weren't what did her in. Are we finally ready for a postgender conversation about the choices all women have to make?

by Shoshana Zuboff

Hillary Clinton did not hit a glass ceiling. Wealthy and powerful Democrats anointed her as their Presidential nominee years ago. She was lowered from above on a jeweled scaffold, and the rest was supposed to be easy. But in the end, Senator Clinton blamed the failure of her campaign on sexist attitudes and media coverage. Some of her followers are pursuing these charges by calling for media boycotts. Even former President Bill Clinton railed against the sexist disrespect he claimed the media had aimed at his wife (this from the man who had subjected her to marital humiliation on a galactic scale).

Did Hillary Clinton encounter sexism along the way? Yes. Many, if not most, women do. A study published last month in the Journal of Child Development reports that 90% of teenage girls have experienced sexual harassment. Last year, a survey released by the Defense Dept. indicated that 34% of active-duty women in the U.S. armed forces reported having experienced sexual harassment. In 2006, 62% of college women acknowledged having been sexually harassed. A 2004 Harris Poll found that 31% of all female workers had been harassed at work. A recent study of university employees showed that more than 40% of faculty women were sexually harassed, as were a large plurality of women and men among service, clerical, and student employees.

A Stubborn Stain

In 2006, as in 1997, sex discrimination accounted for 30.7% of the total charges brought to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The pay gap between men and women continues to be wide—a 31% difference 10 years after college graduation. Working mothers are frustrated by the lack of opportunities for good part-time jobs, and their families suffer. Studies by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund, the National Women's Business Council, and others have repeatedly shown the disadvantages women face in their access to insurance, credit, and health care. The scarcity of women in public- and private-sector leadership is notorious and shameful. Sexism has remained a stubborn stain, and the collective will to confront it seems to have gone dark in recent years.

But was it sexism that brought Senator Clinton down? Or was her campaign torpedoed by the choices she made in response to the inevitable challenges raised by gender and sexism? Clinton's tortuous journey from self-proclaimed next commander-in-chief to self-professed victim of the glass ceiling reflects the many choices that women encounter daily: Do we confine ourselves to the stereotypes of our sex? Do we adapt to a man's world by making ourselves more masculine? Or do we take a leap of faith along a less well defined "postgender" path, finding new ways to inhabit old roles and moving beyond the stereotypes of both sexes?

These were tough calls when I boarded this train 30 years ago, and as Senator Clinton has shown, they are no easier today. Her choices over the past months have prompted me to consider my own choices over the past decades and reflect on what I learned.

Navigating Without Maps

I think of my generation—women who entered the workforce in the late 1970s and early '80s—as "the bodies over the barbed wire." Many of us were the first to cross the threshold. Then we were the only woman in the room. We were on our own, traveling an unforgiving frontier, when Mrs. Clinton was cocooned in her First Lady status in Arkansas then Washington, or quietly attending Wal-Mart (WMT) board meetings while that company racked up one of the worst sex discrimination records in U.S. corporate history. There were few options in those days for confronting sexism. There was no one to tell; no precedent to guide us. Most of us chose to march into the headwinds and do our jobs well.