The United States has had a long, winding path toward gender equality. Progress in closing our nation’s stubborn gender wage gap has slowed, but it recently seemed to be only a matter of time until we closed it. Women are generally more effective leaders who generate higher profits for companies, which should eventually lead to more representation; economies tend to be efficient in that way. A contemporary women’s movement wouldn’t be the first social revolution brought about to serve the economy. Such a movement also wouldn’t be the first economic revolution to help women — when globalization reshaped the global economy, women were the biggest beneficiaries. There’s even evidence that female employment has become more stable than male employment, after women rebounded faster following the COVID-19 pandemic. Recently, however, progress toward gender equality has become less of a straight line and more circular. Trends such as globalization that brought us progress in the past are facing backlash in the form of more nationalist, protectionist populist movements. More concerning, these movements are not only opposed to a system that has helped women but are framed based on narratives harmful to women.

“I don’t know that populism is explicitly built on resentment, but it comes into play. By the nature of elevating ‘us,’ we have to denigrate ‘them.’ It ends up being a definite part of the playbook,” social studies teacher Melvin Trotier said.

In the US, resentment-based narratives have led to a deep chasm within the youngest voting generation. Young men solidly supported populist candidate and current president Donald Trump, while women overwhelmingly supported his opponent, Kamala Harris. Now, Trump is in a position to follow through on the promises he made to his constituents — pushing men to the top, with the unstated goal of leaving women behind.

“[Trump] has had several sexual assault accusations [from] many different women, and he has also repeatedly approved actions that will hurt women. Many people in his cabinet have stated that they want to roll back women’s rights,” junior and Feminist Club member Clara Lazarini said.

Bad Foundations

Rolling back rights is easier if justified on the grounds of societal welfare. If the words of Vice President J.D. Vance are to be believed, the Trump administration feels that career women are causing misery to society.

“At Yale Law School, you have women who think that that truly the liberationist path is to spend 90 hours a week working in a cubicle. [Society] puts people on a career pipeline that causes them to chase things that will make them miserable and unhappy. They get in positions of power and then they project that misery and happiness on the rest of society,” Vance said on a 2021 podcast.

Vance’s view seems unfortunately characteristic of the administration as a whole. According to the doctrine of aggrieved masculinity that President Trump represents, a greater appetite for female representation is pushing aside men, especially through diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. While some DEI initiatives are costly and ineffective, the societal stigma surrounding them has enabled Trump to demonize necessary anti-discrimination policies by calling them “harmful DEI.” That could make it more difficult for women to make it into male-dominated professions, an impact that compounds. Having other women in a workplace makes a woman more likely to succeed there. Another piece of policy that will make life harder for women is an executive order preventing federal employees from working from home. Raising children — a task that still falls mostly on women — is far easier for online workers, and taking away that option will force painful life choices. 

“A lot of people think that DEI puts unqualified minorities in roles that they shouldn’t be in, but DEI just makes sure that everyone qualified gets the same [opportunities] as everybody else,” Lazarini said. “With DEI, companies [would] go out to women and interview them, whereas in a process without DEI, it would be harder for women to get an interview [than men].” 

Trump-era policy could contribute not only to less female employment but also to higher wage gaps, which are likely more prevalent due to Trump’s repeal of laws requiring the collection of pay data in his first term. Not all of the administration’s tactics for removing women from professional roles are so disguised, however. The old-fashioned tactic of just firing women has been used on multiple naval admirals under Trump. By the administration’s logic, a commanding officer with forty years of service is unqualified if she’s a woman. Despite evidence to the contrary, Trump’s rhetoric and policies consistently and clearly uphold the wrongheaded belief that women don’t deserve the progress they’ve made toward wage equality, that they are only promoted due to diversity initiatives that discriminate against men. He feels that he has to discriminate back.

Miseducation

One of the most important engines of female achievement is higher education. Considerably more women get bachelor’s degrees than men; workers with a degree are far more likely to be successful than those without. Because men are more able to make a living without earning a college degree by relying on physical labor, women are less likely to turn down a college education out of a lack of interest. In other words, a good education is far more important to a woman’s future than a man’s. Over the past thirty years, U.S. policy has focused on building up a “knowledge economy” that leverages our elite higher education system to produce advancements in industry. Now, however, higher education has become a target. Vance gave a speech in 2021 titled “The Universities are the Enemy,” a mindset that has carried through to the current administration. The antagonism even extends to students — a freeze on collecting student loans is being lifted with little advance notice, failing to give families time to prepare; more loan debt is held by women than by men.

Universities are starting to feel the impacts of Trump-era policy. Billions of dollars of medical research funding have been cut from research institutions by the National Institutes of Health. Elite universities have been individually targeted for funding cuts, including $790 million at Northwestern University, $1 billion at Cornell University, a planned $510 million at Brown University, $175 million at University of Pennsylvania and $210 million at Princeton University. Harvard University has been singled out for the most extreme punishment of all, amounting to a $2.4 billion funding freeze and an attempted ban on Harvard’s acceptance of international students. Top-shelf liberal arts schools are not this administration’s definition of what college should look like. The work of right-wing activist Christopher Rufo and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, ideological bedfellows of the Trump administration, at New College of Florida provides an example of the Make America Great Again movement’s ideal higher education system. The goal seems to be for schools to have more sports and less of a focus on academics. Rufo, an infamous culture warrior added to the school’s board of regents by DeSantis, celebrated the influx of men who chose to attend the school. The people in charge of our country seem to believe that universities should be less prominent and have more men, a two-pronged attack that could be devastating for American women.

Working Man

“Tariff” as a search term has exploded ever since President Trump placed tariffs on a swath of countries around the world. Limitations on free trade are roundly harmful, but the costs may be disproportionately borne by women. Part of the rationale behind the levy was to increase domestic manufacturing jobs. According to Vance, no amount of cheap goods can make up for the loss of one U.S. manufacturing job. Manufacturing jobs aren’t bad; they contribute to wage equality by allowing lower-educated workers to find valuable employment. The problematic nature of Vance’s comment lies in the unconditional prioritization of a male-dominated industry over free trade policies that disproportionately benefit women, who are more likely to be lower-income than men. With tariffs often blatantly discriminating against women, it’s little surprise that free trade usually decreases the gender wage gap. Contrary to Vance’s opinion, and despite the best efforts of the current administration, we are better off economically than we’ve ever been as a country. Women enjoy far better opportunities and rights than they did in the days when manufacturing played a dominant role in our society. Attempts to return the U.S. to its past days as a manufacturing power are senseless.

Mr. Roboto

The mutual attraction of the Trump administration and Silicon Valley is tangible across the board and most apparent in the realm of artificial intelligence. Trump shepherded a $500 billion commitment into AI infrastructure from private firms and rolled back AI regulation while Vance warned that any regulation would stifle the technology. The implication of their stance is that the “smart people” of the Valley are our ticket to the future, and precautions and safety checks by bureaucrats only get in their way. While deregulation isn’t necessarily harmful, big tech is by far the worst industry to leave alone. These companies have a horrible track record on consumer safety and an even worse track record on safety for women. All of that makes our tech sector basically the worst possible segment of American society to empower, but Trump seems drawn to their ethos. An idea recently circulating Silicon Valley is “founder mode,” in which the founder of a company refuses to relinquish control or delegate tasks but instead relies on their own supposedly unique knowledge and skill to drive the company forward. Men can get away with it at times; women who try to run a company this way are usually vilified. In the tech sector, though, bro culture prevails. Seven-tenths of AI workers are men, and the leaders of the artificial intelligence movement — Sam Altman, Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Dario Amodei and their ilk — have pretty roundly developed a reputation for unrestrained founder-style operation. 

“Some [Silicon Valley] support came from [proposed] sanctions on businesses. Meta, [in] the last two weeks, has been in front of Congress for antitrust issues. That [support] was preemptive on their part,” Trotier said.

The fact that a cabal of men is making the biggest decisions on AI on behalf of the rest of humanity is concerning on its own, but it grows more so in the light of the fact that the technology might give men a hand up. We’re already seeing this on a small scale; women are much less likely to use generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and more likely to believe that such tools are neither ethical nor useful — meaning men are more likely to benefit from them. Larger impacts will come when AI starts automating jobs. Over the next five years, the technology is projected to take more jobs from women than from men. Low-wage jobs will be, as usual, the easiest to automate, and labor-intensive, male-dominated jobs will be mostly safe due to the current incapacity of AI to perform physical tasks. That combination doesn’t augur good things for female wage levels. AI presents one of the foremost threats to human achievement and especially female achievement, but the present administration refuses to treat it with the necessary care.

Necessary Lesson

It’s too late to keep Trump and Vance out of the Oval Office, but if this Trump administration cannot be prevented, it is at least imperative that it is learned from. The president’s early actions and policy priorities have proven that his anti-woman rhetoric translates very well into anti-woman policy. Similar rhetoric is on the rise, with populist leaders across Europe leveraging traditional gender roles to gain support and heads of state like Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, India’s Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey and Russia’s Vladimir Putin making misogyny a hallmark of their administrations.

“There has been a rise in more extreme right policies, and not just in America. I’m from Brazil, so I’ve seen that rising in Brazil too, and all over Latin America,” Lazarini said.

Unfortunately, it’s been consistently proven throughout the world that sexism can be politically popular. That’s unacceptable. However, if we learn to take leaders at their word when they make demeaning comments about women and apply those lessons at the ballot box, we can change that. Nothing in politics is inevitable, especially equality; the systems that have contributed to female achievement in the past are not immune to the winds of political change. But if nothing is inevitable, that means that the populist, sexist authoritarian vein of politics isn’t inevitable either. If we learn from this moment in history, perhaps we can make the dream of equality a reality.