I’d only flipped through one Flickr album so far. But I started to check the feed regularly to see if the trend continued. It did, and I noticed something else. There’s a looseness to Obama when he’s hanging out with the boys club that doesn’t appear in co-ed gatherings. Sometimes he even literally engages in locker room humor, as in this photo before a speech at the University of Texas. The President blows off steam on the golf course with male colleagues and friends. He takes to the White House basketball court with NBA stars, men’s college players, and male cabinet members and members of Congress. (Obama also played a quick game of PIG with members of the University of Connecticut’s national champion women’s basketball team.)…

Even when women are in the room with Obama, they are sometimes seen but not heard. At a 2010 symposium on women in finance, Christina Romer, then the chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, talked about the difficulty she had getting the floor in policy discussions. Suskind relates the story of how Obama’s reacted angrily to one suggestion by Romer, and yet calmly heard out the same suggestion from Larry Summers a few days later. Other senior women have complained that their arguments seemed to disappear into the ether at meetings, unacknowledged by Obama. Ellen Moran, Obama’s first communications director, was the first member of his team to leave the White House, resigning just 92 days into the term…

Even at the dinner pushed for by top female staffers so they could air their grievances directly with Obama, his reaction–as told by Suskind–amounted to an apologetic shrug. The men who cut their female colleagues out of meetings and decision-making were his friends and closest advisers. He needed them, and didn’t seem inclined to rein them in. The unspoken message: toughen up and deal with it.