- The US-China summit in Beijing featured only male delegates in the main meeting room
- Experts criticised the absence of women as a step back for meritocracy and inclusion
- Obama-era summits included senior female officials, unlike the recent all-male meeting
The bilateral summit between the United States and China in Beijing did not feature a single woman. Photographs that emerged from the high-stakes meeting at the Great Hall of the People between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping revealed entirely male delegations.
The visuals have triggered widespread backlash and a global debate regarding gender representation at the highest levels of diplomacy.
Gita Gopinath, an economics professor at Harvard University, took to X and described the all-male optics as, "A painting of the end of meritocracy: A meeting of the two largest economies and not one woman at the table."
She spoke to the Guardian and further described the situation as "inexplicable" about how the two countries ended up with a "single-gender" table despite having many talented women around the world.
"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," Gopinath said.
Halima Kazem, the associate director for Stanford University's programme in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies, also raised her voice on the issue to say that the world has "gone backward". She drew a comparison between the Obama-era US-China summit and the current one and said that the former "included women at the table".
"Now neither superpower thinks women belong in the room where great power politics happens," she told the publication.
Kazem noted that the absence of women is not just an "American failure" but a signal from both sides that women's voices do not count when it comes to "shaping the global order".
She highlighted that the choice to present an exclusively male lineup projected a "masculine, militarised, and exclusionary" form of global authority.
Earlier, the summits during the US-China summits during the Obama era featured prominent senior female officials like Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Liu Yandong.
Although the US-China bilateral meeting in the Great Hall of the People did not include women, a few accompanied Trump on his visit to Beijing, including his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, Jane Fraser, the CEO of Citigroup and Meta President Dina Powell McCormick.
