The campaign of Senator Clinton may or may not be on its last legs, but feminist Gloria Steinem believes Americans should vote for Mrs. Clinton because she’s a woman.

Last weekend in Texas, before yesterday’s primary elections in Texas and Ohio, Miss Steinem said that, because she is female, Mrs. Clinton faced pressure to step aside in favor of Senator Obama, the other Democratic presidential candidate. This echoed Miss Steinem’s January New York Times op-ed piece which concluded that “We have to be able to say: ‘I’m supporting her because she’ll be a great president and because she’s a woman.'”

Most widely reported were Miss Steinem’s comments denigrating the 5-year imprisonment and torture in Vietnam of Senator McCain, saying that his time at the Hanoi Hilton was no qualification for being president. Perhaps Miss Steinem prefers Jane Fonda’s performance tour of Hanoi.

Is it indeed, as Miss Steinem suggests, sexism that is motivating calls for Mrs. Clinton to step down? Or is it practical politics, that Democrats perceive Mrs. Clinton as a less-electable candidate?

Miss Steinem wrote in the New York Times that “gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House.” She believes that even in 2008, women are marginalized in American life, denied equal opportunity and equal achievement solely because they are women. To make up for this, the voters should choose a woman to be the next president.

She fails to account for circumstances that have changed the status of women since Miss Steinem, who will be 74 years old on March 25, took up the cause of feminism 45 years ago.

By many economic measures, American women are doing as well or better than men, and Mrs. Clinton’s personal experience embodies that success. American women’s labor-force participation rates rose dramatically during the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1960s, governors’ wives would host tea parties; in the 1980s, Mrs. Clinton worked as a partner at Little Rock’s Rose Law Firm.

By 2007, women lagged only 14 percentage points behind men in the rate they participated in the labor force, 73% versus 59%. In 1960, the gap was 46 percentage points.

When Chelsea Clinton completed her graduate studies at Oxford, after earning her undergraduate degree at Stanford, she went to work at McKinsey & Company, the global consulting firm. In 1960, she might have skipped graduate school altogether and got married.

Civilian unemployment rates for men and women have tracked closely since the early 1980s. In 2007, the unemployment rate for men was 4.7%, and the rate for women was 4.5%.

American women do well compared with their global counterparts. America has one of the highest percentages of women who choose paid work. American women have lower unemployment rates than do women in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

Women are increasingly moving into managerial and professional occupations and leaving blue collar work. Only a quarter of women, compared with half of men, are in the slower-growing blue collar lines. A higher percentage of working women than men are in the better paid managerial and professional occupations. Isn’t America ready for a managerial and professional president?

Some conclude that the existence of sexism is demonstrated by women’s wages, which they allege are 77% of men’s. Never mind that the 77% figure is misleading, arrived at by comparing all working women with all working men, without accounting for experience, hours worked, or job.

The latest figures show that comparing men and women who work 40 hours weekly yields a wage ratio of 88% — before accounting for different education, jobs, or experience, bringing the wage ratio closer to 95%. Senator Clinton is paid exactly the same as Senator Obama for doing the same work, although given her more extensive background, some might say she should be paid more.

It’s difficult to look at Mrs. Clinton and conclude that she has been deprived in any way. People don’t ask Mike Huckabee, another Republican presidential candidate, to bow out because he’s a man, they ask him to step aside because they say he can’t win the nomination. The same is true of Mrs. Clinton.

Yet Gloria Steinem argues that we should vote for Mrs. Clinton because she’s a woman, to make up for centuries of sexism. That’s as absurd as saying that we should vote for Mr. Obama because he’s black, to make up for slavery and then segregation. When Americans go to the polls in November, they will vote, one by one, for the candidate they deem the best qualified to lead the country over the next four years. And that candidate might not be female.

Ms. Furchtgott-Roth, dfr@hudson.org, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and coauthor of “The Feminist Dilemma: When Success Is Not Enough.”