Heidi M. Przybyla

USA TODAY

By any office standard, and especially for Bill Clinton’s 1990s-era, male-dominated West Wing, Patti Solis Doyle had an unusual work arrangement: a baby crib in her office.

It was her employer, then-first lady Hillary Clinton, who encouraged her scheduling director to bring her new baby girl to work. The arrangement lasted three months and included intern babysitting shifts and a nap-time door sign reading “Lee is sleeping.”

Over more than two decades of public service — as first lady, presidential candidate, senator and secretary of State — a hallmark of Clinton's management has been the hiring and promotion of women, from high-profile policy advisers and campaign managers to entry-level clerical staff.

#ClintonNation: This is why Americans are voting for Hillary Clinton

It's reflective of how she's likely to staff and operate the White House, as well as an indication of how she would seek to govern as the nation's first female president (she's already committed to appointing women to half of her Cabinet positions).

“She made the work place flexible for us to grow. That was happening in very few places in corporate America,” said Solis Doyle, who worked for Clinton for 17 years and said she “firmly believes she supports women.”

“I can say this stronger than anybody because she fired me,” said the one-time 2008 campaign manager, who endured a painful public split as the candidate retooled her failing campaign.

Demanding boss

USA TODAY contacted a dozen former female employees of Clinton, many lower-level staff listed on a 15-year-old government expenditure report from her Senate office.

These women say she could be demanding and blunt, and she expected results. Heather Hurlburt, a former speechwriter, recalled one unpleasant situation in which she was sent back to the drawing board to rewrite a speech several times.

Clinton was almost always accommodating for women whom she considered talented. Even now, some of the nation’s highest-profile female executives, like Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer, reject the flexible work schedules that Clinton allowed 20 years ago.

As the first woman to have had her own professional career up to the time she became first lady, Clinton had experienced the balancing act of having children and a career.

“Basically out of nowhere in a meeting she said ‘You know what, Patti, I’ve been thinking about it, babies are very portable at this age. I think you should put a crib in your office,’” said Solis Doyle. “She could tell I was anxious” returning to work.

In the White House, a significant percentage of Clinton’s staff was female. A review of a 2001 Senate payroll shows more than half of her staffers were female. Fifty-five percent of her current campaign staff are women, according to a recent FEC report, including political director Amanda Renteria, two of her three top policy advisers and most of her communications team. Still, the campaign’s top advisers remain mostly male, including chairman John Podesta, manager Robby Mook and chief strategist Joel Benenson.

Melanne Verveer, a former chief of staff to Clinton when she was first lady, said she “didn’t set out to hire women," but they formed a large pool of applicants. Working inside the Clinton White House was grueling, with marathon meetings and 18-to 20-hour days, and Clinton didn’t “take crap from people,” said Solis Doyle. Yet her staff loyalty is well-documented, with the word ‘Hillaryland’ often used to describe her innermost circle of confidantes.

Critics accuse the Clintons of earning loyalty like the mafia — via iron rule and intimidation. And groups supporting Republican nominee Donald Trump are running ads suggesting she’s no advocate on women’s issues.

Interviews with former staff, none of whom work for the current campaign, suggest a different source of that loyalty.

They said Clinton played the role of mentor — from accommodating working mothers to encouraging younger women to pursue higher education; as well as smaller gestures like including junior staff in meetings, giving advice on toddler ear infections, remembering birthdays, sharing leftovers from events and even participating in an '80s sing-along planned by junior Senate aides.

“She recognized that you get great talent out of people when they feel they’re part of a family," said Neera Tanden, who served Clinton from the time she was first lady to her 2008 campaign. "I’ve had the success I had because, at the time I had kids, I didn’t have to take a step back," she said.

Jennifer Kritz, now a hospital communications director in Boston, hasn’t worked for Clinton for more than 14 years, and her stint included working on constituent services in her New York Senate office.

Yet she also described her office as "like a family." When Kritz decided to leave and attend graduate school, Clinton arranged “a sit down,” she said, “and I really felt like she was engaged and interested in me.”

Clinton’s convention to go straight at trust issue

April Springfield Blanco got an internship by cold-calling Clinton’s office after seeing her testify before Congress. She later dropped out of college to type Clinton’s book, It Takes a Village. For at least six months, Blanco was by Clinton’s side as she passed the handwritten pages.

Yet the decision upset Blanco’s father, a bus driver from Georgia who’d worked hard to send her to college. Clinton invited Blanco’s parents to her birthday party. “She pulled him aside and told him she would make sure I went back to college,” said Blanco.

And she did. In 1996, Clinton set aside time from the campaign trail to proof Blanco’s essays. “She was probably the primary reason I went back to school,” she said, adding that the first lady later reached out to her while she attended Wellesley, Clinton's alma mater.

Not that Clinton was easy. Hurlburt, the former speechwriter recalled that Clinton also called to apologize after she was particularly critical during a series of speech rewrites.

“The thing that’s so smart about that as a management technique is she builds immense loyalty,” said Hurlburt. Clinton was not a yeller, said Blanco: “I was around her in all kinds of private situations, I think I would remember that.”

A formative experience

Clinton’s own child-care struggles had been mitigated by the fact that her mother, Dorothy Rodham, had moved in with her in the governor’s mansion in Arkansas.

Yet one experience may have been formative. Before she was first lady, Clinton represented the American Bar Association crisscrossing the country listening to female paralegals and lawyers struggling to balance work with child-care demands. “I don’t think she anticipated what she heard,” says Verveer. “What she got was an earful from partners in those hearings, about the difficulties women in the profession were having.”

Solis Doyle wasn't the only one who brought her baby to work.

During the first two months of the Clinton administration, Shirley Sagawa brought her son, Jack, in a basket until she found child care. One day, in the middle of a conference call, he started screaming. "I looked up to see Hillary in my doorway and was sure that was the last day he would be in the office." Instead, she picked him up and walked him around while I finished my call," said Sagawa.

In 2003, Tanden, then a legislative director, left the office every day at 6 p.m. to put her baby to sleep, then worked in the evenings.

"You give people maximum flexibility to be good workers, and then people want to do a really good job," said Tanden, noting she wound up working longer hours.

Her efforts to help working mothers were a constant throughout Clinton's career. At the State Department, after town hall meetings with employees, she changed the child-care policy to include back-up care since there were not enough slots at the agency’s Diplotots program.

One of Clinton’s proudest accomplishments is the product of an all-female staff effort: her 1995 speech in Beijing in which she declared that “human rights are women’s rights.”

Most of Bill Clinton’s male staff opposed the trip, especially coming after the arrest of Chinese-American activist Harry Wu, on the grounds it would further inflame relations with China, said Verveer. Clinton was looking beyond geopolitics to an opportunity to advance women’s rights.

“There were times when the women had to rally,” said Verveer. “Sometimes there are issues the guys don’t see.” As they jetted to Beijing, Clinton leaned over to her speechwriter, whispering, “I wanna push the envelope as far as I can," Verveer said as she recounted the story.

More than 15 years after Clinton left the White House as first lady, policies that would assist other working mothers, such as paid parental leave, remain unrealized.

“Maybe now, the time has come,” said Verveer.