Hillary Clinton Thinks Women Voted Against Her Because of 'Fathers and Husbands and Boyfriends and Male Employers'

Women will have no empathy for you.
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As Hillary Clinton talks about her book What Happened, one question that keeps coming up is why she lost the 2016 election. On this week's CBS Sunday Morning, she said her biggest mistake was not to sympathize enough with Americans' anger after the financial crisis. She also said that "misogyny played a role" in an interview with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof earlier this year.

In a recent interview with NPR, Hillary elaborated on how sexism may have lost her women's votes in particular. (Forty-two percent of women voted for Trump in the presidential election.) "When women are serving on behalf of someone else, as I was when I was Secretary of State, for example, they are seen favorably," she said. "But when they step into the arena and say, 'Wait a minute, I think I could do the job, I would like to have that opportunity,' their favorabilities goes down."

She referenced a discussion with Sheryl Sandberg, who told her that women become less likable when they're more successful, whereas it works the opposite way for men. "Sheryl ended this really sobering conversation by saying that women will have no empathy for you, because they will be under tremendous pressure—and I'm talking principally about white women—they will be under tremendous pressure from fathers and husbands and boyfriends and male employers not to vote for 'the girl,'" she said. "And we saw a lot of that during the primaries from Sanders supporters, really quite vile attacks online against women who spoke out for me; as I say, one of my biggest support groups, Pantsuit Nation, literally had to become a private site because there was so much sexism directed their way."

Gloria Steinem came under fire for making a similar argument last year about the primary, telling Bill Maher, "When you’re young, you’re thinking, you know, Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie."

Some viewed this claim—and Hillary's—as sexist, since it starts from the assumption that women make decisions based on men rather than thinking for themselves.

Hillary also partially blamed James Comey's letter about her email account on her loss. "After the Comey letter, my momentum was stopped. My numbers dropped, and we were scrambling to try to put it back together, and we ran out of time," she said. But she still feels good about her campaign overall. "When you win the popular vote by 3 million votes, and when there were all of these outside forces coming at me right until the very end, I don't think you can say that we didn't have a strong campaign," she said. "I'm proud of the campaign we ran."