New Delhi: When US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping sat down at the bilateral table inside Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on Thursday, the ceremony was elaborate: Chinese soldiers stood at attention, children waved American and Chinese flags, while senior officials flanked both leaders. But photographs of the meeting quickly drew attention for something missing— women.
Not one woman was seated at the negotiating table representing either the United States or China. This prompted commentary from academics and gender scholars online.
“A meeting of the two largest economies and not one woman at the table,” Gita Gopinath, Harvard economics professor, wrote, sharing a picture of the meeting in which US and Chinese officials were sitting facing each other.
Gopinath, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, described the scene as “a painting of the end of meritocracy.” Her post accumulated more than 22,000 likes overnight. Speaking to The Guardian, she said the images reflected a shift away from capability and toward entrenched networks as the currency of power.
“We have somehow gravitated back to this idea that what matters is your network and not your capabilities,” she said. She called the omission of women “inexplicable,” given the number of qualified female leaders in both countries.
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‘Serious diplomacy’
Halima Kazem, associate director of Stanford University’s programme in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies, drew a contrast with former President Barack Obama’s administration. During Obama’s presidency, bilateral US-China meetings regularly included senior women on both sides — among them former Chinese Vice Premier Liu Yandong, former US National Security Adviser Susan Rice, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“We’ve gone backward…This was a choice about what kind of authority to project: masculine, militarised and exclusionary. When both superpowers perform power this way, they’re jointly defining what ‘serious’ diplomacy looks like and who gets excluded from it,” Kazem said.
A few women reportedly did travel with Trump’s delegation during the two-day Beijing visit, including his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, Citigroup chief executive Jane Fraser, and Meta president Dina Powell McCormick, but none were seated at the bilateral table itself.
Neither the White House nor Chinese state media have so far commented on the composition of the delegations.