“How do you get on this kind of Goldilocks path where you're not too strong and you're not too weak, you're not too aggressive and you're not too passive?” Hillary Clinton said in an interview on the podcast “TBD with Tina Brown.” | Charles Krupa/AP Photo 2020 Elections Hillary Clinton says 2020 female candidates unfairly have to avoid looking 'angry'

Hillary Clinton said in an interview this week that the female candidates for the 2020 Democratic nomination are unjustly facing the challenge of not looking "aggressive" or "angry" — and must instead take a "Goldilocks path" of looking just right.

“How does a woman stand up for herself on the biggest stage in the world without, No. 1, looking aggressive — maybe a little bit angry — that somebody is behaving like that, being willing to go toe-to-toe, when there are so few memories embedded in our collective DNA where women do that?” Clinton said in an interview on the podcast “TBD with Tina Brown.”


As the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016, Clinton and her supporters have argued she faced a double standard as the first female candidate from a major party seeking the nation’s highest office. Women, she said, often face scrutiny and criticism for perceived qualities or traits that would not be applied to men.

“How do you get on this kind of Goldilocks path where you're not too strong and you're not too weak, you're not too aggressive and you're not too passive?” the former secretary of State said to Brown in the interview. “This is still a problem for women on the public stage.”

Even in the early stages of the 2020 primary, discussions about how media coverage of female candidates compares to the portrayal of male candidates have emerged. As she rolled out her campaign, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) made headlines for her alleged reputation as a brutal boss among staffers, comments some have called sexist.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) has also faced early questions about her background as a prosecutor, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) supporters have speculated that she will face some of the same challenges Clinton did in terms of public perception.

In the interview, however, Clinton said she thinks the larger pool of women in the race for the White House makes the path “a little bit easier,” exposing the media and the public to a wider range of speaking styles and campaign approaches. She also thinks future female candidates will learn from her experience running for president.

“Sometimes,” she said in the interview, “the way you think you’re coming across can be filtered in a way that you don’t even imagine.”