Reading beyond the headline, I kind of agree that she faced a sexist double standard where she suffered electorally for things that wouldn't have impacted a male candidate as strongly.
Being a slimy, self-entitled political creature is pretty acceptable for a male politician.
Then again she did win the election by 2 percentage points. So as much as I dislike her, it's probably more of a structural issue than either sexism or candidate quality.
She's been suffering sexism for a long time. When bill was fucking around and cheating on her in the 90s, people were straight up blaming her for it. They were also being horrible to Monica L, while giving bill a wink and a nod for being a dude.
The problem is that she took that and instead of making herself a softer, sympathetic and likable politician, she just doubled down on being harsh and unlikable.
Somewhat related but I was both happy and sad to see Edie Falco play Hilary on "impeachment". She is so incredible in the role but we only got like a small handful of scenes of her.
Yeah, it's one of those things that some people try to convince themselves they don't care about. They'll say things like "that's their relationship" or "she's an independent woman", I'm not sure they really believe it though. Most of them wouldn't act the same way in their own relationships, unless they thought they had no other choice or had something to gain.
2016 was a year for an anti establishment candidate. A slimy insider can work in years where that isn't the case, see Biden or Bush Jr for examples of it working.
It's really hard to prove sexism played a role in a presidential election, but the number of women serving for 20+ years in the house and senate makes it seem unlikely.