Hillary Clinton’s gender was exactly the non-issue in the first Democratic debate of the looking-up-again 2016 election that she always wanted it to be in her failed 2008 race to return to the White House.

There was no need to prove that she’s tough enough to be president.

There was no need to answer questions about whether she’s likable – let alone listening to condescending swipes about how she’s “likeble enough”, as she did from Barack Obama nearly eight years ago.

On Tuesday in Las Vegas, there was nobody asking her how “as a woman” she “keeps so upbeat”. It was just Clinton on a stage with her four male opponents – even the ones polling around 1% against her – and everyone going toe-to-toe on everything from foreign policy to her “damn emails” to mass incarceration to income inequality.

Clinton’s gender was finally taken as a matter of course in the campaign, after months and months of mentioning what a proud grandmother she is. But a strange thing happened all the way inside the Wynn hotel: gender issues hardly came up at all, unless Clinton brought them up herself.

Though she gave the last of the debate’s opening statements, Clinton’s was the first mention of women that wasn’t a reference to a candidate’s wife or daughters (“I believe in equal pay for equal work for women, but I also believe it’s about time we had paid family leave for American families and join the rest of the world”) as well as the second (“and, yes, finally, fathers will be able to say to their daughters, you, too, can grow up to be president”).

After that, Bernie Sanders brought up but flubbed his reference to paid family leave, identifying it only as something that ought to be offered to mothers:

You see every other major country saying to moms that, when you have a baby, we’re not going to separate you from your newborn baby, because we are going to have – we are going to have medical and family paid leave, like every other country on Earth.

Which, well: research shows that equal amounts of parental leave is better for women in the work force, fathers at home and children in general.

Lincoln Chafee invited voters to break down his record on “a woman’s right to choose”. And, sure, he got 100% rating from Naral in 2004, but dropped to 65% in 2005 after voting for the confirmations of US supreme court justice John Roberts and conservative federal judge Janice Rogers Brown.

Then, it was nearly an hour until women’s issues came up again, when host Anderson Cooper asked a question about income inequality and Sanders mentioned pay equity in passing.

Clinton later used a question on Social Security to talk more at length about women who are dependent on lower Social Security checks because of past income inequality and some women’s reliance on a husband’s income.

She also made the next reference to women in the debate (“I can’t think of anything more of an outsider than electing the first woman president, but I’m not just running because I would be the first woman president”). But it wasn’t until after a series of questions on climate change and energy policy that host Dana Bash asked the first question about women’s issues of the debate – more than 90 minutes into a 2-hour deabte.

Bash asked Clinton to respond to Republican candidate Carly Fiorina’s criticism (which is common across the Republican party) that mandating paid parental leave will kill small businesses.

Clinton responded that state-mandated programs in California hadn’t killed off small business and that “We can design a system and pay for it that does not put the burden on small businesses.”

Clinton then smartly pivoted to her own personal experience:

I remember as a young mother, you know, having a baby wake up who was sick and I’m supposed to be in court, because I was practicing law. I know what it’s like. And I think we need to recognize the incredible challenges that so many parents face, particularly working moms.

In Bash’s follow-up, she asked Clinton to respond to critics of expanding the size of government, and Clinton made the only reference to Planned Parenthood of the entire debate: “They don’t mind having big government to interfere with a woman’s right to choose and to try to take down Planned Parenthood”, which earned solid applause.

Sanders, on the other hand, responded to the same question by doubling down on his earlier statements that it’s women who should stay home with the kids, and thus be the recipients of paid parental leave: “Every other major country on Earth, every one, including some small countries, say that when a mother has a baby, she should stay home with that baby.”

In his response, Martin O’Malley – with his only direct statement about women’s issues – mentioned both the expansion of paid leave in Maryland when he was governor and the fact that paid parental leave can help “include more of our people more fully in the economic life of our country” and make sure that “women aren’t penalized in having to drop out of the workforce”.

O’Malley later closed his portion of the debate by congratulating his fellow candidates for not denigrating women – which, well, that’s a pretty low bar.

But that was it when it came to women’s issues at the first of six Democratic debates: no full-throated defense of reproductive rights, no discussion of how access to abortion is becoming tantamount to the right to have one, no mention of campus sexual assaults during the debates about university education, no mention of girls in Stem (or sexual harassment in Stem at public universities, which has been in the news), no real discussion of Planned Parenthood or the threatened government shutdown, nothing about the Hyde Amendment or contraception access in the health care, or even which women should or would be considered for potential cabinet positions.

It was as though women in America had become a side issue, something brought up in passing, voters not unique from the masses.

And that, in the end, might be the most harmful thing for Clinton in 2016: having staked a bunch of her campaign thus far on the idea that women’s issues are national, economic issues and that they can carry her to the White House, the mostly male moderators of the first Democratic debate of the primary offered her only one question about women’s issues to answer, and then only three-quarters of the way through the debate.

If she’d intended to convince the political establishment that “women’s issues” weren’t just about women, Hillary Clinton may have failed. And that doesn’t bode well for the year ahead.