It’s not that young women aren’t feminists, or don’t care about sexism. For college-age women — Mr. Sanders’s 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.
....
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 work force. 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.
....
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.”
....
There are many other reasons women in the 30-and-over cohort may lean toward Mrs. 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?
