Despite corporate efforts to tackle gender bias, Hillary Clinton still sees room for leaders to improve

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says she’s encountered a fair amount of gender bias throughout her career, from courtrooms to the debate stage. She reflected on her experiences at a March 12 conference hosted in New York City by Catalyst, a nonprofit focused on building workplaces for women.

There was the time when she was representing a north Arkansas college in a lawsuit, for example, and returned to the courthouse from her lunch break to find the front row filled with a group of men in camouflage. When she asked about it, the bailiff told her they were hunters who had come into town for supplies, “heard there was a lady lawyer in town, and they couldn’t believe it, and wanted to see it for themselves,” she said.

Or the more infamous example of being stalked by former President Donald Trump on the debate stage, a moment she interpreted as him sending the message, “I’m an alpha male and that’s who you want as president.” While working in business and legal jobs, Clinton said she was often the only woman in a group, and remembers “saying something that nobody paid attention to until somebody else said it later, usually a male colleague.”

An ongoing challenge. Clinton said she’s been heartened to see some organizations recognize how such examples of bias negatively affect women’s career trajectories, but added that she still sees room for improvement.

She offered the example of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who in 2019 spoke about how two female executives brought the issue of pay disparities at the company to his attention. Though Benioff initially doubted his company paid women less than men, he ultimately recognized that due to “unconscious bias,” that was actually the case. Salesforce has since committed to the principle of “equal pay for equal work.”

Despite HR teams’ efforts to tackle implicit biases in their workplaces, statistics show disparities remain. Recent research from financial services firm Morningstar finds the gender pay gap persists, even at the highest levels of organizations: Women in the senior-most executive roles at S&P 500 companies earned 85 cents for every dollar men in the same jobs earned in 2022. The consulting firm McKinsey has tracked positive trends for female representation at senior levels in recent years, with the share of women in the C-suite rising by six percentage points from 2018 to 2023. But it’s also documented a “broken rung” where women—particularly women of color—encounter barriers that hinder their career progression. In 2023, 73 women of color were promoted to manager out of every 100 men, down from 82 for every 100 men the year prior.

“It still is a problem,” Clinton said of gender bias. “And therefore, I think we need to keep talking about it and try to make it as visible as possible, and try to help both men and women find strategies for dealing with it.”