LONDON/WASHINGTON: Eyeing to become the first woman president of the US, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has said that if elected to the White House half of her Cabinet would be comprised of women.
“I am going to have a cabinet that looks like America, and 50 per cent of America is women, right?” Ms Clinton said during a MSNBC town hall last night on the eve of the crucial East Coast primaries in five states – Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Rhode Island.
Her remarks comes a day after her campaign manager John Podesta said that he would like to see Indian-American Neera Tanden in Ms Clinton’s Cabinet.
Ms Tanden had worked for Clinton for more than 14 years and currently is head of the Center for American Progress (CAP), a think-tank which has made its own mark at the national and international level under her leadership.
In July, Ms Clinton is likely to be the first woman to be nominated as a presidential candidate by a major political party.
The former secretary of state, who as the First Lady had said that women’s rights are human rights, has made women policies a central part of her campaign.
“I’ve devoted a lot of my public life to advocating for women’s rights being human rights, and making the case that we have to do everything we can, through laws, regulations, culture, to change the still-existing stereotypes that hold women back,” Ms Clinton said during the MSNBC town hall.
“I think it’s also really important to recognize that we have made progress but we are still a long way from where we need to be. I know that if you look at pay, for example, equal pay is still a problem, and it’s a problem that gets worse as you get older,” she said.
“So young women coming right into the workforce often are paid pretty close to equal, if not actually equally. But within a few years there begins to be a disparity. And it’s hard to explain all of the difference because people claim, well, women make different choices and therefore they have a different kind of work life because of those choices but that does not explain all of it,” she added.
Ms Clinton said she wants to really make a big, big push on equal pay for women.
“This has to finally be accomplished. I believe that if we start early and we are absolutely determined we can make a big change there. I want to make a big push for early childhood education because we can talk all we want about our schools,” she said.
PTI