In foreign policy, even if you hold high office, you can't be sure what the effects will be of the things you do.

It was interesting that feminists of my generation told me: You are discouraging younger women; you are confirming stereotypes of women; you are opening a door, initiating a debate, that will harm our movement. And my point was: We are already having this debate, especially in the younger generation.

There's a tremendous loss of talent to businesses who cannot make room for their employees to attend to family responsibilities. It really amounts to corporate waste: They hire really talented women and then lose them because they can't find ways to keep them productive and content the minute they can't "lean in."

The European problem is that it assumes that the minute a woman has a child, the mother identity subsumes the professional identity. Now she's the mother, above all, and we must give her all this time.

I am convinced that this country is ready to have a woman in the White House, but I also think there's still a lot of hidden sexism.

What I'm suggesting is we are going to look back, and we're going to see what happened in Syria, and we're going to see the larger destabilization of the Middle East, the rise of extremism, and we're going to wonder... Why didn't we at least try to force a political solution - at an acceptable cost to us, because no one is saying we should send in ground troops - and if we did it would be worse than doing nothing... If we do not act, we are going to look back and wonder why we didn't.

When we talk about gender pay gaps in the United States, and if you look at women without children, they earn 96 cents for every dollar that a man is earning, while for mothers it is about 76 cents. That's nearly 25 percent less. For single mothers, the situation is even worse. One third of them are living in poverty or just on the edge of poverty. This is an unacceptable situation.