Hillary: Sexism or Self-Sabotage?

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My experiences are not unique. Most of the women I know have faced similar challenges, and many came to a similar place. Millions of women less privileged than I have endured far worse. The way I look at it, our determination not to be derailed by sexism produced a society replete with women graduates, doctors, lawyers, police, academics, technicians, writers, managers, artists, engineers, businesspeople—workers and professionals of every stripe. We paved the way for "girl power." We made it possible for a woman to go anywhere and do anything, like becoming President.

We set the stage for Hillary's historic opportunity to throw a lifeline to a careworn nation fed up with the head-butting, chest-thumping, feather-preening, teeth-baring men in charge. I, like many others, hoped she would stand on our shoulders—her success would be the legacy of all we had endured. The world would see that it was possible for a woman to rise above the stereotype of her sex, without becoming the stereotype of its opposite. The daily confrontation with sexism wasn't going to melt away, but it would be irreversibly altered when bathed in this new postgender light.

A Woman Who Could Lead Like a Man

But Senator Clinton blinked. She didn't take the leap of faith that so many of us had. She chose to present herself as a woman who could lead like a man, rather than as a woman who could lead. The female vote was taken for granted; she courted the men. As the campaign faltered, the need to prove herself more than a mere woman propelled her to a grim place of bluster and swagger where she tried to outmacho the machos. Instead of forging a path to a new postgender candidacy, she succumbed to counterfeiting a warrior's résumé—dodging sniper fire and forging peace treaties—while threatening Iran, knocking back boilermakers, and posturing for those 3 a.m. phone calls. But voters in Indiana and North Carolina showed they were not impressed by her manly strut.

It was only then that she turned to her female identity and, in a last-ditch effort to rally more women, she blamed her failures on sexism. In the ultimate paradox, it was her unlikely opponent—a young man of two races, raised by a woman, father of young daughters—who took up the challenge of postgender leadership. He sustained a moral center that could not be reduced to any gender stereotype and refused to be drawn into her macho game.

So where does Clinton's candidacy leave us? No one can now doubt that our country will back a nominee for high office who is a woman. Among the ironies of unintended consequences, the disrespectful nonsense aimed at Senator Clinton might serve to rekindle our national determination to confront sexist attitudes and practices at work and in society. But perhaps most compelling about Hillary Clinton's journey is that it invites every woman to reflect on how she chooses to behave in the daily rendezvous with sexism. It is a cautionary tale that reminds us we are not condemned to ricochet between the two poles of sexist stereotypes. It suggests that many of us are eager, hungry even, for a postgender conversation. We may even be ready to ask ourselves if the choices we make reflect the human beings we wish to be.

Shoshana Zuboff is the author of The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism. She was the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.