Hillary’s office politics

Young women aren’t voting for Clinton. Maybe that’s because they haven’t faced years of sexism at work

The poll numbers and primary results so far tell a simple story: Younger Democratic women are mostly for Bernie Sanders; older women lean more toward Hillary Clinton.

The mothers-versus-daughters narrative, long an election-year trope, is particularly pronounced now, and tinged with stereotypes on both sides. The idealistic but ungrateful naifs who think sexism is a thing of the past and believe, as Sanders recently said, that “people should not be voting for candidates based on their gender” are seemingly battling the pantsuited old scolds prattling on about feminism.

Instead, the reality may be another kind of simple numbers game: More time in a sexist world, and particularly in the workplace, radicalizes women.

Radicalism isn’t expressed only by supporting a socialist; it can also take the shape of women, increasingly disillusioned by a biased culture, throwing their weight behind someone who shares both their political views and their experiences.

It’s not that young women aren’t feminists, or don’t care about sexism. For college-age women — Sanders’ female base — sexism tends to be linked to sex. Young women see their clothing choices policed as being too “sexy,” their birth-control options determined by their university or their boss, their right to abortion debated, sexual assault rampant and often badly dealt with on campuses.

In response, they are taking action. They are abortion-clinic escorts. They are reforming campus policies on assault and for transgender students. They are leading the Black Lives Matter movement. Young women are neither ungrateful to their feminist foremothers nor complacent; rather, they are activists for feminist causes that reflect their needs.

Teresa Younger, president and chief executive of the Ms. Foundation for Women, says that young women now grow up in an environment that values their futures — certainly more than they have in the past — and this means they have “different lived experiences” than feminists of Clinton’s generation, which can mean different priorities in voting.

These experience include being in university environments where there are more female than male students, and coming from high schools where girls outperform the boys. Equal treatment of women and men on college campuses remains regulated, albeit imperfectly, by Title IX. Women attend graduate schools in roughly equal or greater numbers than men. College-educated women see only a tiny pay gap in their early- and mid-20s, making 97 cents for every dollar earned by their male colleagues.

That experience starts to change a few more years into the workforce. By 35, those same college-educated women are making 15 percent less than their male peers. Women’s earnings peak between ages 35 and 44 and then plateau, while men’s continue to rise.

What starts out as a near 50-50 professional split among new lawyers, for example, becomes a big gap: Women are just 17 percent of equity partners at law firms generally, according to the National Association of Women Lawyers.

When women have children, they’re penalized: They’re considered less competent; they’re less likely to be hired for a new job; and they’re paid less. For men, having a child helps in hiring and pay. For many families, it starts to “just make sense” for the husband to take on the role of primary breadwinner while the wife drops out of the labor force, compromising future earnings when she tries to go back to work.

“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, executive director and chief economist for the Washington Center for PEOPLE WALK through a maze of political signs for Hillary Clinton and Democratic opponent Bernie Sanders outside the Gaillard Center before the start of the NBC News-YouTube Democratic Debate in Charleston on January 17. 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.

In jobs that followed, managers would remark that they wanted “more women” and proceed to reject qualified candidates. (Similar dynamics took place with minority candidates.) There were always reasons — not the right cultural fit, not the right experience, a phenomenon of unintentional sexism now well documented in controlled studies. I watched as men with little or irrelevant experience were hired and promoted, because they had such great ideas, or they fit in better. “We want a woman,” the conclusion seemed to be, “just not this woman.”

Watching a primary election in which an eminently qualified woman long assumed to be a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination faces a serious challenge from an older white guy with exciting ideas, many women my age and older hear something familiar, and personal, in the now-common refrain about Hillary Clinton: “I want a woman president, just not this woman president.”

“A lot of the women I was friends with in college would have never called themselves feminists, but now that we’ve been in the workplace for 10 years, a lot has changed and they’re becoming more radical,” said Aminatou Sow, a digital strategist and a founder of a support network for women in technology called Tech LadyMafia. They realize, she said, “that the work world and the world at large remains a place that’s built by men and for men.”

That’s part of what makes Clinton’s candidacy so compelling for Sow. “I pray to God that one day we can field a female Bernie Sanders candidate, some disheveled lady yelling, and the country will seriously consider her,” she said. “But nothing in our culture indicates to me that that’s remotely possible right now.”

It is possible that it will change, and that a 19-year-old aspiring lawyer who is volunteering for Sanders today will work for firms with more female partners and live in a world where the wage gap has shrunk. But the trends show that her experience in a decade is unlikely to be that different from mine.

While the contours of sexism shift with age, the number of usable hours in each day shrinks. Many more women over 25 are in the workforce than those under, and women over 25 also do about twice as much unpaid domestic work as their younger counterparts.

For the many women who live at the center of that time crush, Clinton’s emphasis on the wage gap, paid family leave and universal prekindergarten may be particularly appealing. Sanders, who also supports paid leave and universal preK, takes a different rhetorical tone, usually stressing affordable higher education and universal health care.

“It’s great to talk about free college, but if you wanted to do something that would help a lot of families, address the really important issue of care in the zero-to-5 years,” Boushey, the economist, said. “Child care is just as expensive in many places as sending a kid to public university, but a college kid can get a part-time job. A toddler can’t.”

There are many other reasons women in the 30-and-older cohort may lean toward Clinton. They’ve already seen promises of revolutionary change fall short. They may prefer a candidate with a progressive ideology but a more restrained, and potentially more effective, strategy for putting that ideology in place.

They also want to see a woman in the Oval Office. If it’s not this woman, this year, then who and when?

At 32, I’m right at the sweet spot between “older millennial” and “uninteresting adult” — enough years on the planet to qualify as a grown-up, but still no house, no mortgage, no marriage, no children, but a job I like, a law degree, and the large pile of student loan debt that comes with it.

Most of that is the result of specifically feminist achievements unthinkable a century ago: an open door to college and law school; a bank account and credit card in my own name; easy access to birth control, which not only made it possible to delay marriage and childbearing but also made it mostly unremarkable to be an unmarried, childless 32-year-old; a culture in which women are expected to have identities outside of “wife and mother.” Even my own resentment at the sexism I’ve experienced can be articulated, described with specific terms, because of decades of feminist activism.

These are huge successes. The world is a better place for women who graduate from college today than it was when Hillary Rodham was featured in Life magazine for her anti-establishment commencement address at Wellesley in 1969.

Perhaps someday, this better world we’ve made will even create room for another feminist victory: a female president of the United States.

If it’s not this woman, this year,

then who and when?