Dealing with Male-Chauvinism/Hillary’s Way

If you are “luxury wives” of politicians, you would probably not mind when being asked about your husband’s opinion on topical issue of the day, or receiving praise on your husband’s brilliant political skill. You would have felt proud to be connected in marriage with such a “great man”. But when you are professional women, holding one of highest offices in a government, you would feel annoyed when, at a press conference, a question from the floor is not about what you do but about your husband’s opinion on political issue. The US Secretary of State, Hillary R. Clinton was right to be annoyed and angry when an African chauvinist male stood up at press conference to ask a question not about what issue that she was dealing with in Africa but about what her husband’s opinion was. If the situation were in reverse, any male politician with pride, would be angry if the question was about his wife’s opinion instead of about him. But men usually would not dare to insult another male politician in public that way. This type of insulting situation only happened to professional/political woman. As a United Nations professional staff attending many international meetings, my male colleagues would come up to ask me what my husband was working on, or about his opinion on political issues, instead of about me and what interesting work I was doing. Feeling insulted, I used to brush them off by saying “Go and ask him yourself” etc. This is not an issue of competition between “Bill and Hillary”, as many male journalists and the international media had made it to be. It is an issue of discrimination against women, and the trivialization of work performed by a competent professional women. I am glad that Hillary Clinton did not allow that African man questioning her to get away with such a “put down” in public without receiving a strong reaction from her.