Cosmopolitan appears to have determined that conservative women don’t, in fact, count as women. At the very least, the magazine has evidently decided that conservative women’s political views permanently preclude them from receiving praise, even for their objective success.

In a piece yesterday, Cosmopolitan senior writer Rebecca Nelson highlighted seven women who are supposedly “generating 2020 buzz,” and every single woman on her list is either a Democratic politician or a public figure committed to the left-wing cause.


“Unlike past elections, where one woman competed in the primaries against a gaggle of men, this time, there’s a slew of eminently qualified women waiting to run,” Nelson informs us. And yet not a single one of the women included under that umbrella is anything other than a staunch progressive.

Nelson evidently had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to serve up seven sufficiently left-wing options. For politicians, she offers the inexperienced senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Duckworth, and Kamala Harris, none of whom has been in the Senate longer than six years. Two of them — Duckworth and Harris — were just elected last November.

The list doesn’t mention Republican Susan Collins, who has been a GOP senator from Maine for over two decades. It also disregards the GOP’s remaining four female senators, several of whom have been in office longer than the Democratic senators Nelson names.


Likewise ignored are female Republican governors across the country who outnumber their Democratic counterparts four to two. Nelson snubs U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, who served a successful six years as governor of South Carolina and who is widely considered one of the GOP’s rising stars.


Nelson sees fit to include progressive public figures Sheryl Sandberg and Oprah Winfrey, neither of whom has any political experience, but she makes no mention of Condoleezza Rice, the first black woman to serve as U.S. national security advisor and subsequently as secretary of state. Carly Fiorina, the first woman to lead a Fortune 20 company and the only female candidate for the Republican presidential nomination last year, is ignored as well.

It’d be completely unsurprising — if irritating — for a left-wing outlet such as Cosmopolitan to compile a list called “7 Progressive Women Who Could Be Our First Female President.” It’s entirely different for the magazine to run a feature claiming to highlight prominent female American leaders and then ignore an entire segment of those women just because of their politics.