Who knew the Clinton White House was such a sexist place? It had a female secretary of state, a female attorney general and may produce the first woman president – but Dee Dee Myers makes it clear in “Why Women Should Rule the World” that she’s still smarting from the chauvinist slights she received in the West Wing.

In this half-memoir, half-feminist treatise, Myers complains that she was appointed Bill Clinton’s White House press secretary, the first woman to hold the job, but not given the authority that goes with this important position. “George [Stephanopoulos] would be the director of communications, he would handle the daily briefings. He would take the press secretary’s office. He’d carry the highest rank,” she complains.

Just as bad was Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, who was totally unsympathetic when she pointed out that a male colleague with the same rank but far less responsibility earned more money than she did. When she asked for a raise, she writes Panetta explained, “He was a partner in a law firm. He took a huge cut to come here . . . Plus, he’s got a family. It’s not going to happen.” And this was the White House that had an Office of Women’s Initiatives and Outreach that daily faxed press releases about their concern for, among many women’s issues, equal pay for equal work.

According to Myers, other women staffers at the White House had it just as tough. She recounts a meeting in Italy of the G-7 when Laura Tyson , the chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, couldn’t get a word in edgewise or even a seat at the table where the men were sitting. “As we left the room, I sidled up to her, ‘I can’t believe what just happened in there,’ I told her. ‘Unbelievable,’ she answered, slowly shaking her head, and we headed off to fight the next battle.”

Myers also complains about being left out of the loop when Clinton launched Tomahawk missiles at Iraq in retaliation for Saddam Hussein’s assassination attempt on George H.W. Bush. That day she was told to go home to change her clothes and look more businesslike before she was finally brought up to speed by in-the-loop David Gergen

In fact, the way Myers looked and dressed while press secretary still seems to bother her. “Blond. Blonder. Less blond but longer. Short again, with roots,” she writes, still despairing about her lack of style. She envies a senior woman in the administration who admits she spent $25,000 on clothes for her new job and, most of all, remarks on Stephanopoulos’ sartorial shrewdness. He bought “four new suits from Barneys so that he would be able to stand behind the White House podium on Day One.”

But besides a sprinkle here and there of West Wing tidbits, the book is a mix of anecdotes, factoids and statistics proving women are still unable to get a seat at the table. This is balanced by anecdotes, factoids and statistics proving women, in most ways, are superior to men. Myers’ basic premise, much like a women’s studies master’s thesis circa 1984, is that if women ruled the world – and they should – everything would change for the better. Businesses would be more productive. Communities would be happier and healthier. That’s because, like cooperative female bonobos, a species of ape, for which Myers has a special fondness, women are more collegial than men.

There is one woman, though, about whom Myers has surprisingly little to say. When she does mention Hillary Clinton, she seems less than enthralled. Writing about the woman who might be the first female president she declares, “It seems that not only her policies but her approach . . . tilts masculine. And that explains why voters have yet to fall in love with her. In a world where people have different expectations for women, she pays a price for showing us her steel spine more often than her soft heart.”

Yes, Meyers wants women to rule, but the press secretary in her seems to know the best way to get there. Her suggestion seems to be: Hillary, more tears.

Myrna Blyth is the author of “Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness – and Liberalism – to the Women of America.”

Why Women Should Rule the World

by Dee Dee Myers

Harper