Anna Quindlen has been around a long time, is no extremist (though I suppose I don't agree with her much), at times writes well, and I want to know her point of view. But here she said something rather astonishing. Discussing Hillary Clinton's run for president, she wrote: "Certainly there may be Americans who covertly balk at the notion of a female president, despite what they may tell pollsters. And every time Clinton is described as calculating or ambitious, you realize that such words are never used for male politicians because for them both traits are assumed—and accepted."
Huh? "Never"? On the contrary, I've heard Democrats call George W. Bush the equivalent of calculating and ambitious many times (when some say he lied us into war in Iraq to benefit oil companies etc etc, isn't that the equivalent of suggesting he was at the very least "calculating"?). And on the other hand, many, many Republicans back in the 1990s suggested that, yes, Bill Clinton was very calculating and ambitious; that was something they didn't like about him. They argued that he would take any position, switch any position, in order to get elected (see "triangulation").
There probably are terms that are sort of gender-ized (men don't get labeled as a "witch"; and I can't remember ever seeing a woman called a "thug" or "thuggish"), but I don't think "ambitious" is one of them.
