Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton said that if U.S. nationals elected her, women would make half of her Cabinet, MSNBC reported. Sanders won Rhode Island, but Clinton took Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and CT.
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Clinton has said before that she hoped to settle the gender score in her Cabinet, when asked by Cosmopolitan where she would “make a commitment to have atleast 50 percent women in a Clinton administration Cabinet?”
A gender-balanced Cabinet would be another historic first for the country.
“Well, I am going to have a Cabinet that looks like America, and 50 percent of America is women”, Clinton said during an MSNBC town hall on Monday.
Clinton on Monday also said that someone with military experience will be an “asset” as a running mate, especially as the country faces a “complex, unsafe world”. Clinton, by contrast, isn’t just positioning herself as the “woman candidate”, she’s trying to set herself apart from the hard-line conservatism of her opponents. A female vice-President may also be in the fray, but that is considered a distant possibility. Currently, President Obama has four women in his cabinet: Attorney General Loretta Lynch of the Department of Justice, Secretary Sally Jewell of the Department of the Interior, Secretary Penny Pritzker of the Department of Commerce, and Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell of the Department of Health and Human Services. There have been only 30 women cabinet members in United States history, and President Obama has appointed nine of them in his two terms, the most of any Presidency. Whereas she declined to allude explicitly to her gender for most of the 2008 campaign, Clinton has been clear about her perception of feminism, and has sought to use her female identity in her electoral strategy. After Perkins left office in 1945, it would be another 30 years before another woman was made a Cabinet secretary, when President Ford appointed Carla Hills to be his secretary of Housing and Urban Development. It looks like she’s upgraded the 50-50 Cabinet from a goal to a promise.
If Clinton is elected as president, it would be a historic first for the nation.
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Clinton said her fellow New Yorker is out of touch with everyday Americans.
