Clintons leadership and active advocacy for womens issues, on the other hand, is a common thread that is present throughout her time in public life. While at the State Department, she established the first federal Office of Global Womens Issues to ensure that gender equality is a cornerstone of international-relations practices, including through partnerships with local entrepreneurship programs across Africa and Southeast Asia aimed at helping womens businesses succeed as well as plans to engage women in diplomacy and community-building in places like Burma and Afghanistan. Her efforts to support womens rights domestically and globally are no ancillary concern: They are intrinsically tied to the core of the work she does.
In her own Senate officewhere Clinton was known for aggressively ensuring that the men and women who worked for her were equally paid and were offered family-leave timethis underlying thread is especially apparent. The public release of Clintons email tranches revealed numerous occasions when members of her staff were granted extra vacation days around the holidays to spend more time with their families. And when Anne-Marie Slaughter, the departments policy planning director, suggested Clinton do the same to let employees know it was all right, Clinton did just that, leading by example. As Slaughter said at an Atlantic Live event earlier this year: I knew Hillary Clinton cared. I talked to her about having kids when she hired me. Whats more, during her time as senator, Clinton hired twice as many women as men to work in her officea proportion that upends the overwhelming trend in Washington.
