By the time Donald Trump and Xi Jinping met at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on Thursday, the bilateral had featured all the expected pomp and pageantry: a meticulously choreographed display of Chinese soldiers, children waving American and Chinese flags, and rows of senior officials and the US’s top business executives.
Conspicuously absent at the table, however, were women from either delegation – a stark visual that quickly drew criticism from observers who saw it as an unmistakable display of patriarchal power.
In a tweet that has attracted over 22,000 likes overnight, Gita Gopinath, an economics professor at Harvard University, wrote: “A painting of the end of meritocracy: A meeting of the two largest economies and not one woman at the table.”
Halima Kazem, associate director for Stanford University’s program in feminist, gender and sexuality studies, echoed similar sentiments.
Comparing Thursday’s images to bilateral meetings during Barack Obama’s presidency, Kazem said: “We’ve gone backward. Obama-era US-China summits included women at the table. Now neither superpower thinks women belong in the room where great power politics happens. This isn’t just American failure – it’s a bilateral signal that women’s voices don’t matter in shaping the global order.”
Speaking to The Guardian, London, Gopinath elaborated on her comments, saying: “We have somehow gravitated back to this idea that what matters is your network and not your capabilities – and that matters [in terms of] whether or not you get a seat at the table.”
She added: “It’s just inexplicable how you end up with a single gender table, given the many talented women around the world.
Women seated at previous US-China bilateral meetings during Obama’s presidency included Liu Yandong, China’s then vice-premier, as well as Susan Rice, US national security adviser, and Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state.
Kazem pointed to the type of power being ostensibly signaled by both sides, saying: “This wasn’t about lack of qualified women – both countries have plenty in their diplomatic and security establishments. This was a choice about what kind of authority to project:
masculine, militarized, and exclusionary.
“When both superpowers perform power this way, they’re jointly defining what ‘serious’ diplomacy looks like and who gets excluded from it,” she added.
'The New York Times' noted one striking feature of the delegation: the overwhelming dominance of men.
The US business delegation consists almost entirely of male corporate leaders, including Elon Musk of Tesla, Tim Cook of Apple and Jensen Huang of Nvidia.
The 'New York Times' noted that the gender imbalance extends beyond the corporate delegation into Trump’s official team as well.
Women accompanying Trump in Beijing largely hold communications, protocol or support roles, according to the report.
These include Monica Crowley, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly, presidential aide Natalie Harp, communications adviser Margo Martin and Lara Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law.
Unlike Trump’s 2017 visit to China during his first term, First Lady Melania Trump is not part of this delegation.
ends
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