The Exclusion of Women at the Trump-Xi Summit: A Look at Global Power Dynamics
Donald Trump and Xi Jinping sat down for that high-stakes summit in Beijing on Thursday. The visuals from the Great Hall of the People, that was the centerpiece. And immediately, it started sparking conversations that went way beyond just tariffs and trade. It brought up Taiwan, and a lot of nervousness.
Photographs from that bilateral meeting showed the usual setup. Rows of senior officials, diplomats, business leaders from both sides. But there was one thing that really jumped out. Not a single woman seated at the main negotiating table.
That detail caught everyone’s eye. It drew instant scrutiny from academics, scholars, observers. They started talking about how power just keeps getting concentrated, projected by men at the very top of global politics.
Gita Gopinath, an economics professor at Harvard and former IMF Deputy Managing Director, posted something that got traction online. She wrote: “A painting of the end of meritocracy: A meeting of the two largest economies and not one woman at the table.”
Later, when she spoke to The Guardian , she elaborated. She said we’ve somehow drifted back to this idea that what actually matters is your network, not your capabilities. Whether you get a seat at the table.
It’s just inexplicable, she said. How you end up with a single-gender table, given how many talented women are out there globally.
The summit itself at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People featured the kind of carefully choreographed spectacle you expect from major US-China diplomatic events. Soldiers lined pathways. Kids waved flags. Top business execs joined the officials for Trump’s three days.
But even with all that geopolitical and economic power projected, the visible centers of authority on both sides? They remained overwhelmingly male.
The White House released a list of who accompanied Trump. Seventeen influential American business leaders and executives. Only two were women: Jane Fraser, CEO of Citi, and Dina Powell McCormick, president of Meta.
The rest of the delegation was mostly big names. Tim Cook, Apple CEO. Elon Musk, Tesla CEO. Jensen Huang, Nvidia chief.
It mirrored the pattern on the Chinese side, too. Xi’s entourage featured Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Cai Qi. China currently has no women among the twenty-four members of its Politburo, the top policymaking group.
Then there’s the protocol side. Women present were mostly in communications, or protocol. Monica Crowley, White House chief of protocol. Anna Kelly, spokeswoman. Natalie Harp, aide. Margo Martin, communications adviser. Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law.
Lynn Martin, president of the NYSE, later posted that she was part of the business delegation, even though her name wasn’t on the official list.
Melania Trump, the President’s wife, wasn’t there this time.
Why were academics and observers so critical of the optics? It wasn't just about who was there. It was about the symbolism of exclusion at a moment when these two powers were making massive decisions.
Halima Kazem, an associate director at Stanford’s Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies program, compared it to earlier US-China summits during Obama’s time.
“We’ve gone backward,” Kazem told The Guardian . “Obama-era summits included women at the table. Now neither superpower thinks women belong in the room where great power politics happens.”
She argued it wasn’t just an American thing. It was a bilateral signal. A message that women’s voices don’t matter when shaping the global order.
Kazem pointed back to earlier meetings. Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, Liu Yandong—women were visibly involved then.
The point wasn't about a lack of qualified women in diplomacy. Both countries have plenty of them in their security and policy institutions.
“This wasn’t about a shortage of qualified women,” she insisted. “It was a choice about what kind of authority to project. Masculine. Militarized. Exclusionary.”
When both superpowers act this way, they’re jointly defining what ‘serious’ diplomacy looks like. And who gets left out. It’s about who occupies the positions of formal authority during one of the world’s most consequential meetings.
Written by Gree News Team — Senior Editorial Board
Gree News Team covers international news and global affairs at Gree News. Our collective of senior editors is dedicated to providing independent, accurate, and responsible journalism for a global audience.
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