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The absence of women at the main Trump-Xi bilateral table has sparked debate online, with critics calling it a troubling reflection of who gets represented in global diplomacy.
US President Donald Trump participates in an expanded bilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. (REUTERS)
As US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping sat down for their high-stakes summit in Beijing on Thursday, the visuals from the Great Hall of the People quickly triggered another conversation beyond tariffs, Taiwan and trade.
Photographs from the bilateral meeting showed rows of senior officials, diplomats and business leaders from both sides. But one detail stood out sharply: there was not a single woman seated at the main negotiating table.
The optics quickly drew scrutiny from academics, scholars and observers, many of whom described the summit imagery as a stark reflection of how power continues to be concentrated and projected by men at the highest levels of global politics.
A post by Gita Gopinath, an economics professor at Harvard University and former IMF Deputy Managing Director, gained wide traction online after she wrote: “A painting of the end of meritocracy: A meeting of the two largest economies and not one woman at the table.”
Speaking to The Guardian later, Gopinath elaborated on her remarks and said: “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 added: “It’s just inexplicable how you end up with a single-gender table, given the many talented women around the world.”
What Did The Trump-Xi Summit Photos Show?
The summit at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People featured the kind of carefully choreographed spectacle that typically accompanies major US-China diplomatic engagements.
Chinese soldiers lined ceremonial pathways, children waved American and Chinese flags, and top business executives from the United States joined senior officials for Trump’s three-day Beijing visit.
But while the gathering projected geopolitical and economic power, observers noted that the visible centres of authority on both sides remained overwhelmingly male.
According to The New York Timesthe White House released a list of 17 influential American business leaders and executives accompanying Trump to Beijing. Only two of them were women: Jane Fraser, the chief executive of Citi, and Dina Powell McCormick, the president of Meta.
The remaining business delegation included several of the world’s most recognisable corporate leaders, among them Apple CEO Tim Cook, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Nvidia chief Jensen Huang.
The broader American delegation reflected a similar pattern.
Senior officials greeting Xi alongside Trump included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, along with other largely male advisers and officials.
Women present within Trump’s wider entourage were mostly in communications, or protocol. These included Monica Crowley, the White House chief of protocol; White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly; presidential aide Natalie Harp; communications adviser Margo Martin; and Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law.
Lynn Martin, president of the New York Stock Exchange, later posted on social media that she was part of the business delegation, although her name did not appear on the White House’s original list.
Melania Trump, the US President’s wife who had accompanied him during his 2017 China visit, was absent this time.
On the Chinese side too, very few women appeared in official summit visuals.
Xi’s entourage prominently included Foreign Minister Wang Yi and senior Communist Party official Cai Qi. China currently has no women among the 24 members of its Politburo, the country’s top policymaking body.
Why Are Academics And Observers Criticising The Optics?
Criticism surrounding the summit imagery centred less on individual appointments and more on what scholars described as the symbolism of exclusion at a moment of major geopolitical decision-making.
Halima Kazem, associate director for Stanford University’s Program in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies, drew comparisons with earlier US-China engagements during Barack Obama’s presidency.
“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,” Kazem told The Guardian.
“This isn’t just American failure – it’s a bilateral signal that women’s voices don’t matter in shaping the global order.”
Kazem pointed to earlier summits where women such as former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former US National Security Adviser Susan Rice and China’s former Vice-Premier Liu Yandong were visibly involved in bilateral discussions.
She argued that the issue was not a shortage of qualified women within diplomatic or policy institutions.
“This wasn’t about lack of qualified women – both countries have plenty in their diplomatic and security establishments,” she said.
“This was a choice about what kind of authority to project: masculine, militarised, and exclusionary.”
Kazem further argued that such summit imagery helps shape broader global perceptions about leadership and legitimacy in international diplomacy.
“When both superpowers perform power this way, they’re jointly defining what ‘serious’ diplomacy looks like and who gets excluded from it,” she added.
For many observers, the issue was not simply attendance, but who was seen occupying the positions of formal authority during one of the world’s most consequential bilateral meetings.
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