Trump team seeks details on State Dept. women's issues programs | TheHill
President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team asked the State Department for information programs and positions related to women’s and gender issues, The Washington Post reports, sparking worries from some officials.
The Trump team sent State Department offices and bureaus a “Flash Transition Tasker” on Wednesday morning requesting full reports about “gender-related staffing, programming and funding.”
The request, obtained by the Post, shows the team specifically asking for information about programs that “promote gender equality, such as ending gender-based violence, promoting women’s participation in economic and political spheres, entrepreneurship, etc.”
While Trump himself may be personally misogynistic, I don’t think he wouldn’t be too interested in systematic misogyny in either direction. I think there’s a good chance this is Ivanka looking for some project to put her name on. “Promoting women’s participation in economic and political spheres” sounds like something that could be part of her personal brand.
I thought that too, but this shows the drawbacks of a sort of nepotistic, non-politically-homogenous government. You don’t know if a request is coming on behalf of the conservative dad who wants to crack down on feminism, or the feminist daughter who wants to help, and all the bureaucrats end up living in a veil of eternal anxiety.
Not that this is relevant to the systemic-theory point, but I feel the need to say: I believe that Trump thinks of himself as actively pro-woman, if not necessarily “feminist” in so many words, and I’m pretty sure that he would be at least theoretically in favor of (and enthusiastic about) “programs that promote gender equality, such as ending gender-based violence, promoting women’s participation in economic and political spheres, entrepreneurship, etc.”
Remember that he was hiring women for executive positions, in sizeable numbers, before that was an expected thing to do.
…which is not to say that he doesn’t think of “hot” as being an essential characteristic of a Satisfactory Female, or that his vision of a Perfectly Cromulent Workplace doesn’t involve big heaping helpings of sexual harassment. There are lots of ways to be sexist, and they don’t all correlate perfectly. Just because you grab women by the pussy doesn’t mean that you don’t want them to be politically active or entrepreneurial.