Photographs of the US-China bilateral meeting in Beijing on Thursday have sparked criticism after showing no women at the negotiating table. The meeting, which took place at the Great Hall of the People, featured President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping alongside senior officials and top business executives, but all were men.
Harvard economics professor Gita Gopinath described the image as “a painting of the end of meritocracy”, noting that the two largest economies met without a single woman present. She told the Guardian that the absence suggested a return to valuing networks over capabilities, and questioned how a single-gender table could occur given the many talented women worldwide.
Halima Kazem, associate director of Stanford University’s feminist, gender and sexuality studies programme, contrasted the scene with US-China summits under Barack Obama, which included women such as China’s then vice-premier Liu Yandong, US national security adviser Susan Rice, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She said the current image represented a step backward and a bilateral signal that women’s voices do not matter in shaping the global order.
Kazem argued that the all-male line-up was a deliberate choice to project a “masculine, militarized and exclusionary” form of authority, and that both superpowers were jointly defining what “serious” diplomacy looks like and who gets excluded. Although a small number of women accompanied Trump on his visit, including Lara Trump, Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser, and Meta president Dina Powell McCormick, none were seated at the main table.
