Hundreds of women who had hoped to advance their personal careers by latching onto Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign have been left disappointed by the outcome of the Nov. 8 election, Bloomberg News reported this week.
The aspiring bureaucrats, each of them “poised to take jobs — and burnish their careers — in a Hillary Clinton administration,” are faced now with “deferred ambitions.”
Once filled with confidence that they would be rewarded with plum federal jobs for their years of loyal service to the Clintons and the Democratic National Committee, these women will instead suffer the indignity of a professional setback.
Bloomberg reports on the unspoken victims of Clinton’s electoral defeat:
As the first woman nominated as president by a major political party, Clinton said she intended to form a cabinet that reflected the country’s gender balance. Women were in the running for chief of staff and secretaries of treasury and defense, posts that previously only had been held by men.
Her West Wing and executive branch agencies would have been staffed with women who’ve spent decades working their way up the Democratic Party’s power structure.
“Her election would have been a next step for a lot of women to move up in their careers and contribute to the federal government,” said Marianne Cooper, a sociologist at Stanford University’s Clayman Institute of Gender Research. “That would have normalized women in top political roles and shown what their leadership in Washington looks like.”
The moment is now lost for crowding the government pipeline with a new generation of women, many of whom likely would have moved on to leadership in the corporate world or in elected office themselves.
On social media, Bloomberg promoted the story with a similarly sympathy-inspiring headline reading, “Hundreds of women poised to work for the Clinton administration are now out in the cold.”
Women make up 35.3 percent of all top policy appointments in the Obama administration, according to data from the Washington Post and University of California at Berkeley law professor Anne Joseph O’Connell. Under George W. Bush, women made up 16.4 percent of the administration’s Senate-confirmed appointees, and that figure was 23.3 percent under Bill Clinton.
That figure is expected to decline under President-elect Trump, though the billionaire businessman and his team are still hashing out the details of his cabinet.
If it’s any consolation to those “hundreds of women” mentioned in Bloomberg’s report, they’re not alone. A few people lost big betting on a Clinton presidency:
Overheard in DC: someone complaining that their firm had hired Clinton-connected people who were now worthless without their connections.
— Alan Cole (@AlanMCole) November 10, 2016
What a shame.
