Women are not just victims of widespread discrimination. They're victims of hidden discrimination.

The widespread discrimination with which most of us are quite familiar is easiest to see in cultures where women simply are not seen as equal, and where the idea of "women's rights" is seen as laughable and/or against the rules of nature or religion. Even in those cultures where there are laws that offer women some protection, those laws are often not enforced and/or not enforcable as a result of ingrained personal beliefs too widespread to be managed by laws. So, easy-to-see, widespread discrimination and any number of injustices and crimes against women run rampant in many parts of the world.

In cultures where women's equality is, at this point in history, predominantly embraced widespread discrimination continues to exist - sometimes in patently obvious ways and sometimes more insideously.

To see examples of the more obvious ways in which discrimination against women exists even in the most enlightened cultures, one need only realize that women don't always receive equal pay for equal work. Another example that may not make the news each day, but that can be seen when watching it, is the fact that skilled, experienced, credible, television news women often lose their jobs to younger, more attractive, less experienced women. Women who have passed a few too many birthdays (only a few) can sometimes hang onto their jobs if they're still attractive enough to allow for "leg shots". While cleavage was once not seen as acceptable on television, it today seems almost to be the norm.

Anyone who even occasionally visits websites, where people have a chance to ask questions or voice opinions, will be shocked to see the discriminatory beliefs, hatred of anyone perceived as a "femininst", and widespread misogyny. While it may seem sensible to disregard such beliefs as "ignorant", the fact is many people do not see it as "ignorance"; and the numbers of people exhibiting that ignorance are vast enough to make it qualify as "widespread".

Questions about whether a woman "could ever really be as good a president as a man" were not uncommon when Hilary Clinton was in the running for the presidency. Discussions of women and PMS arose as a result of the over-60 candidate's name being on primary ballots. Closer to most of our homes, companies often have no formal policy against hiring and promoting women to positions men may or may not have traditionally filled, but that does

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