Former first Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Gita Gopinath, called out the lack of female representation during US President Donald Trump’s bilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“A painting of the end of meritocracy: A meeting of the two largest economies and not one woman at the table,” the leader, who is currently working as Gregory and Ania Coffey Professor of Economics at Harvard University, tweeted.
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She completed her X post with a picture of Trump and Jinping’s meeting, in which women from either delegation were absent at the table.
“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 told the Guardian while speaking about the situation.
“It’s just inexplicable how you end up with a single-gender table, given the many talented women around the world,” she added.
Halima Kazem, associate director for Stanford University’s program in feminist, gender and sexuality studies, echoed Gopinath’s sentiments.
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She told the outlet, “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.”
Kazem continued, “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,” adding, “When both superpowers perform power this way, they’re jointly defining what ‘serious’ diplomacy looks like and who gets excluded from it.”
At the high-level meeting, President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, discussed several global issues. On Thursday, the two leaders met at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Reportedly, Xi Jinping is hosting Trump at the Communist Party’s secretive leadership compound in Beijing.
Trump arrived in Beijing with some of America’s biggest CEOs, including Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Jensen Huang, Larry Fink, and others. A handful of women, including Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, Citigroup CEO Jane Frase, and Meta president Dina Powell McCormick, also accompanied him on the trip.
