Why Sexism at the Office Makes Women Love Hillary Clinton New York Times

“You realize how many women are left standing as you age, and what happens to your brilliant and talented friends and colleagues from your 20s and 30s,” said Heather Boushey, the executive director and chief economist for the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, who has provided advice to the Clinton campaign. “These are tough lessons, and ones that you may not think are as pressing until you actually see them happen to your own friends and cohorts.”

Even for women active in feminist causes in college, as I was a dozen years ago, that can be a rude awakening. As a young lawyer, one of the first things I noticed about department meetings at my law firm was not just the dearth of female partners, but that one of the few female partners always seemed to be in charge of ordering lunch. I listened as some of my male colleagues opined on the need to marry a woman who would stay home with the children — that wasn’t sexist, they insisted, because it wasn’t that they thought only women should stay home; it was just that somebody had to, and the years in which they planned on having children would be crucial ones for their own careers.

I saw that the older white, male partners who mentored the younger white, male associates were able to work long days and excel professionally precisely because their stay-at-home wives took care of everything else; I saw that virtually none of the female partners had a similar setup.

Five Ways Sexiam Colors Public Perception of Hillary Clinton Bitch Media

I’m not saying that Hillary Clinton is incapable of corruption, but it behooves me to mention this: In thirty years of intense searching for corruption, nothing concrete has been found. It’s possible that Clinton has some very good friends in the Democratic Party to protect her, but many of these investigations have been conducted by people with no party allegiance or who have outright hostility to the party, including Kenneth Starr and Representative Trey Gowdy, the persistent investigator into the Benghazi attacks.

Five Ways Sexism Plays With How We Understand Hillary Clinton

1. Sexism limits how she speaks, behaves in public and dresses

2. Sexism dismisses her experience

3. Sexism insists on linking her to Bill Clinton's weakness

4. Sexism hypercriticizes women for things men do with impunity

5. Sexism rejects pragmatism as less significant than idealism

Our impossible expectations of HIllary Clinton and all women in authority The Washington Post

Anyone who seeks public office, especially the highest one, must be ambitious, yet that word is rarely applied to male candidates because it goes without saying. And ambition is admirable in a man, but unacceptable — in fact, downright scary — in a woman. Google “Bernie Sanders ambitious,” and you get headlines about the candidate’s “ambitious plans.” Try it with Donald Trump, and you find references to his “ambitious deportation plan” and “ambitious real estate developments.” When the word is used to describe Trump himself, it’s positive, as in “Trump is proud and ambitious, and he strives to excel.”

But pair the word with Hillary Clinton, and a search spews headlines accusing her of “naked ambition,” “unbridled ambition,” “ruthless ambitions” — even of being “pathologically ambitious.” In a spoof, the satirical website the Onion exposed the injustice and absurdity of demonizing a candidate for this requisite quality through its own version of such headlines: “Hillary Clinton Is Too Ambitious to Be the First Female President.”

Robin Lakoff, the linguist who first identified the double bind as it applies to women in her 1975 book “Language and Woman’s Place,” has pointed out that it accounts for the persistent impressions of Clinton as inauthentic and untrustworthy.

Our impossible expectations of Hillary Clinton and all women in authority by Dana Milbank The Washington Post

Much of Hillary Clinton’s difficulty in this campaign stems from a single, unalterable fact: She is a woman.

I’m not referring primarily to the Bernie Bros, those Bernie Sanders supporters who fill the Internet with misogynistic filth about Clinton. What drags down her candidacy is more pervasive and far subtler — unconscious, even.

The criticism is the same as in 2008: She doesn’t connect. She isn’t likeable. She doesn’t inspire. She seems shrill. “She shouts,” Bob Woodward said on MSNBC this month, also suggesting she “get off this screaming stuff.”

Joe Scarborough, the host, agreed: “Has nobody told her that the microphone works?”

At that, Clinton supporters hollered — about the double standard that condemns her but not Sanders, who bellows at the top of his lungs. The episode was part of a constant stream of commentators (generally men) taking issue with Clinton’s demeanor and conduct — “She’s got to become herself,” David Gergen advised on CNN before Thursday night’s debate — in a way they don’t do with Sanders.

Hard Choices by Michelle Goldberg for Slate

I kept a mental list of every disappointing thing Hillary Clinton had ever done, from supporting welfare reform to voting for the Iraq war to co-sponsoring a Senate bill to ban flag-burning. I wrote article after article inveighing against the idea that Clinton was a feminist standard-bearer. In fact, Iargued, she exemplified “a phenomenon seen in many developing and crisis-ridden countries: the great man's wife or daughter promising to continue his legacy.” I was livid when older feminists like Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, and Linda Hirshman denigrated the young feminists supporting Obama. “If feminism equaled supporting Hillary Clinton, I'm not the only one who wouldn't want anything to do with it,” I sniffed.

It is strange, then, to find myself, eight years later, not only rooting for Clinton, but feeling exasperated by her left-wing critics. I know their case against Clinton. I agree with a lot of it. I worry about what Clinton’s many flaws would mean for a potential presidency. Now, however, watching her be rejected by young people swept up in an idealistic political movement, I feel sadness instead of glee.

Related: A Uterus Doesn't Qualify You To Be President Curve