By DAVID CRARY
AP National Writer
NEW YORK – Even with many high-profile female candidates, the just-ended campaign was rife with sexism ranging from snarky fashion critiques to sexual innuendo. And when all the ballots are counted, women may hold fewer seats in the new Congress than the outgoing one.
“It looks as if we’re going backward rather than forward,” Siobhan Bennett, president of the Women’s Campaign Forum Foundation, said at a teleconference Thursday discussing the prevalence of political sexism.
Two years after Hillary Rodham Clinton nearly captured the Democratic presidential nomination and Sarah Palin was the Republican vice presidential nominee, female candidates dealt with comments about their hair and seamy, anonymous Web postings. Speaker Nancy Pelosi – second in the presidential line of succession – was widely vilified by Republican candidates in ways that often seemed gender-specific.