Senator Amy Klobuchar became the sixth woman to enter the Democratic presidential primary last week with a launch event in a dramatically snowy tableau. For her entry, Nate Silver at 538 laid out Klobuchar's pathways to the nomination, noting her relatability, debate prowess, comfort in early nominating states, and relatively moderate position in the party. Her announcement coincided, however, with stories about her treatment of staff that cast her as critical and demanding and noted the high turnover in her office. In interviews, Klobuchar says her demands on her staff are no greater than the demands she places on herself, and the conversation around her staff immediately became an opportunity to discuss whether being a tough, demanding boss would become a negative story if the candidate were a man. In The Hill, CAWP's Kelly Dittmar raised the question of whether Klobuchar's "Minnesota nice" persona and the criticisms of her managerial style were two sides of the same gendered coin. Discussing this vein of attack, as well as the criticism of Kamala Harris based on when she listened to what music, or Kirsten Gillibrand asking the best way to eat chicken and waffles, or Elizabeth Warren's likability, Margaret Sullivan in The Washington Post asks how sexist the media coverage of women running for president will be and rules out "not at all." Likewise, on the front page of The New York Times, Maggie Astor examined sexism on the campaign trail and how having multiple women in the race might change the narrative arc of the campaign, and CAWP's Debbie Walsh tells her that having six women on the trail will "give women who run for office at every level more leeway, and a path to navigate that may be not quite so narrow."

The processes of power can seem opaque to outsiders, and research shows that women work to make governing more open and transparent. Such was the case when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez discovered the widely prevalent, but peculiar, informal institution of paid line-sitting in Washington. Whether it's a critical Supreme Court case or a controversial hearing, lobbyists and other well-financed individuals and organizations pay other people to hold a spot for them in line, sometimes camping out for multiple days. It's a small way that access to witness our political process is reserved in advance by the powerful, and The Washington Post writes about Ocasio-Cortez shedding light on something taken for granted in the capital.

Meanwhile, The Lily has a story about one of Congress's best, yet little-known, places to build the sorts of informal relationships invaluable to the deal-making process: the congressional gym. Since 1985, the former men's gym, with significantly better facilities than the women's gym, has ostensibly been co-ed, though a significant barrier to women using the gym and having access to the same relationship-building potential as their male counterparts remains, as 34 years after the gym went co-ed there still is no women's locker room. It's a reminder of the myriad cascading ways that our institutions of government remain persistently unfriendly to women's access.

Dear Mama