Has There Been a Backslide in Women’s Workplace Advancement?

On Saturday the Journal’s Jonathan Kaufman and Carol Hymowitz looked at an unfortunate byproduct of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination: an apparent backlash against women’s workplace and societal gains, expressed in uncommonly open misogynist terms.

One of the article’s anecdotes encapsulates the issue: “Katherine Putnam, president of Package Machinery Co., a West Springfield, Mass., equipment manufacturer, recalls that at a lunch she attended recently, a group of male chief executives ‘started talking about what an awful b—- Hillary was and how they’d never vote for her.’ She says she kept quiet. ‘I didn’t want to jeopardize my relationship with them,’ she says. ‘But their remarks were a clear reminder that although I could sit there eating and drinking with them, and work with them, instinctively their reaction to me isn’t positive.’ ”

The piece notes that beyond the tenor of workplace interactions, working women’s gains appear to have slowed or even reversed by some objective measures. In 2007, says the article, women earned median weekly wages of 80.2 cents for every dollar earned by men, down from 80.8 cents in 2006 and 81 cents in 2005, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The incidence of women in top roles at large corporations, law firms and elsewhere exhibits similar trends.

Sen. Clinton is perhaps the world’s most famous working mother, as the now-grown-up Chelsea’s childhood coincided with her mother’s time as a high-powered lawyer, corporate board member and policy-focused first lady. Yet just as her upward trajectory in politics seems to be stalling, some of the advances that women of Sen. Clinton’s generation thought would be givens by 2008 seem to be stalling as well.

Readers, has Sen. Clinton been a particularly polarizing figure in your workplace, and have you seen evidence in your own life of backsliding in women’s workplace advancement? How about at home — do you see Sen. Clinton, regardless of your particular political leanings, generally as a strong female role model for girls and young women, or do others fit that role better?

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