Unleashing Hillary – Is A Millennium of Male Rule Enough?

2016 could be better than 2008 — for women and girls, that is. It’s our century! We have all benefited as Hillary Clinton waits patiently for President Barack Obama to serve his two terms. It’s not race or gender, but race andgender, that’s giving the Democrats a cosmopolitan cultural consensus that stands poised to make the 21st century a different, or rather a diverse, century.

After a millennium of male rule, with the 20th century being one of the bloodiest and most conflict-ridden ever, it’s about time that women, or at least 20 percent women up against a permanent majority of men, got a chance to show what they can do for government when they change the rules.  I imagine it will be a lot less exclusive than any set of rules devised by a former, nearly all-male government.

According to the Washington Post, Hillary supporters fault her handlers for being afraid to let her put feminism front and center in ’08. Now Hillary has new handlers, and the one thing the Ready for Hillary campaign has already discovered is that women count, and whoever wages war on women can get hurt (remember Mitt? I’d like to know who was his handler on feminism).  Even more important than remembering Republicans like Romney is that 98 women sit in the House and Senate today, right now (or 101 if you include three delegates in the House).

Close to a quarter of the power in Congress, in combination with a feminist female president running a feminist executive administration, means women and girls could finally start to benefit from all the laws that already exist but lie in languor, given how poorly they are enforced by the federal courts (e.g. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the Pay Equity Act).

Employers in the United States continue to discriminate because they have little to fear when facing a lawsuit.  Women in top Fortune 500 companies have risen only 0.8 percent over the last 3 years.  The private sector is not being as “efficient” as the public sector when it comes to enforcing equity.  Surprise, surprise.  This is, after all, the less accountable private sector.

If you need more encouragement, just look at tomorrow’s blog on this topic and the stats for the public sector, particularly in K-12.  It’s a lot rosier there — and this gives us an indication of just what women in government could and should do in working with the Obama administration for the next 3 years, all in preparation for the post-2016 inauguration.