This gender skew is both broad and deep

Mar 28th, 2018 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

On the scarcity of women in the Trump administration:

The White House has named twice as many men as women to administration positions. This gender skew is both broad and deep: In no department do female appointees outnumber male appointees, and in some cases men outnumber women four or five to one. Moreover, men significantly outnumber women in low-level positions as well as in high-level ones, with Trump’s Cabinet currently composed of 19 men and five women. Overall, 33 percent of Trump’s appointees are women, compared to 47 percent of the national workforce and 43 percent of the 2 million workers across the executive branch.

Well let’s not be all cowardly and politically correct, here – let’s face facts. Women are stupider than men. It’s crazy generous of Trump to hire any women at all.

There are 75 different departments, boards, commissions, and agencies to which [the admin] has named staffers, from the massive Defense Department to the tiny Delta Regional Authority, and men made up half or more of appointments in 64 of them. In 22, all appointees were male, including at the National Labor Relations Board and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Men made up a majority of appointees in all Cabinet departments, with the skew particularly heavy in Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Labor, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs, where male appointees outnumbered women by as many as four to one.

Well come on. You can’t have women messing around with farming or buying and selling or soldiers or workers or money or former soldiers. That’s all guy stuff, so obviously you can’t have women sticking their made-up faces in it.

The Atlantic analysis showed that the Trump administration’s gender skew occurred at all levels of government—meaning that Trump has more male administration officials to promote to senior ranks, and giving the next Republican administration a gender-skewed pool of potential applicants. “People further up the food chain are picking these people who are lower-level appointees who are also white and male,” Debbie Walsh, the director of the nonpartisan Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers. “This is part of the reason why you need to have people in the room that make decisions that are diverse. Diversity begets diversity.”

Yehbut we don’t want diversity, because diversity just means not-male not-white and that just means Not As Good.

Experts on women in government and Republican political analysts said that a number of interrelated factors contributed to the administration’s gender skew. First was the simple fact that there are more Republican men than Republican women and, across Washington, more men working in conservative politics than women working in conservative politics. Think tanks, lobbying firms, research and advocacy groups, Hill offices, Wall Street: They all have a longtime gender imbalance, and all feed candidates into the administration.

And why is that? Two reasons: conservative men prefer men, and women notice that conservative men prefer men.

It is also possible that Trump—with his history of sexist remarks, alleged commitment of sexual assault, and heavily male inner circle—had turned off many conservative women who might have joined another Republican administration, with his support among conservative women consistently lower than his support among conservative men.

My point exactly. Even very conservative women have some limit on how much overt sexism they can stand.

More broadly—and perhaps more importantly—conservatives as a group care less about gender balance, pushing against identity as a meaningful heuristic on its own.

Which is a convenient shortcut to the goal of making sure nothing ever changes.

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