What Trump’s war on diversity means for for gender equality

IT IS HARDLY six weeks or so ago that second term President Donald Trump started his purge of the US administration eliminating political and bureaucratic opponents and consolidating his power through seemingly unfettered executive lawfare as if he is a latter-day absolute monarch. 

Indeed, one of the first executive orders unleashed by his metaphorical ‘Night of the Long Knives’ on January 20, which in his case was executed in broad daylight, was “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” in the public sector. 

In other words, “Federal employment practices shall not under any circumstances consider DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility) factors, goals, policies, mandates, or requirements."

He, and most of his Republican Congressmen and Senators have long argued that the policy, introduced by his predecessor President Biden, promotes "discrimination" because they encourage employers to promote or hire applicants based on their race or sex. 

This is Trump’s riposte to what he calls “the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion” imposed by woke ideologues. His die-hard cabinet members such as Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth tweeted unabashedly: “The President’s guidance (lawful orders) is clear: No more DEI at @DeptofDefense. No exceptions, name-changes, or delays. The Pentagon will comply, immediately.” 

But beyond the words of the acronym, there is little agreement on what it means. In its wider context it exudes an ominous and cruel irony as the world marked International Women’s Day on Saturday 8, under the bold theme, “For ALL Women and Girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment,” which called for action that can unlock equal rights, power and opportunities for all and a feminist future where no one is left behind.” 

The impact is implicit. Gone are the “chief diversity officers”. The private sector will ignore the order at their peril – non-compliance could mean banks and the whole spectrum of corporates losing lucrative US government contracts. Citi, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan and a host of US corporates have lost no time in abandoning the DEI acronym and rebranding their erstwhile diversity strategies. There is the dilemma of extraterritoriality. How will the long arm of the Trumpian executive order affect the overseas operations of US firms including in South Africa which after all is home to more than 600 US companies? South Africa has very strict diversity, inclusion, equity and labour laws in place, in addition to various social safety nets. 

While there has been both commendable progress and misogynistic obfuscation towards gender parity over the last few decades, with several glass ceilings broken but many still prevalent, this progress at best has been fragmented, selective, self-serving (on the part of men), muted and undermined especially by the contemporary far-right disdain for wokery. 

Perhaps it is unfortunate that gender balance should have been lumped together with a catchall DEI cohort. While there is some overlap between the individual constituents all of which are important and with their various threads, gender parity and rights are so specific and fundamental to society going back to the origin of our species, a battle of the sexes that has been dominated by a brutal patriarchy for millennia. A net impact of the Trumpian DEI playbook is that tracking the progress of America Inc. towards gender parity in the near future will be difficult. 

This was the 50th commemoration of the UN’s IWD, a year which also marks the 30th 

anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, a progressive blueprint for women’s and girls’ rights worldwide. 

Once again, the various speeches and messages relating to IWD were bereft of calling out the cornucopia of Trumpian executive orders, several of which impact women disproportionately. 

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres skirted round the issue: “From pushback to rollback, women’s human rights are under attack. Age-old horrors – violence, discrimination and economic inequality – still plague societies. And newer threats such as biased algorithms are programming inequalities into online spaces, opening-up new arenas of harassment and abuse. Instead of mainstreaming equal rights, we’re seeing the mainstreaming of misogyny.” Similarly, Sima Bahous Executive Director, UN Women, decried that promises made about rights, equality, and empowerment to all women and girls have yet to be realised. “The pushback against those promises is nothing new. We have faced it before; we will face it again. Until gender equality is our shared reality and shared reward, we will not stop,” she added. 

The most considered rebuttal of Trumponomics with its embedded isolationism and unilateralism, came on the eve of IWD from former German Chancellor Angela Merkel in her lecture at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) titled "Empowering women through multilateral cooperation". Merkel served as Chancellor from 2005 to 2021, the first female leader to hold this office, and was one the most influential global leaders of the 21st century. The current WTO Director-General is the widely respected Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a former Nigerian Finance Minister. Dr Merkel emphasised the significance of multilateralism in achieving economic stability and highlighted the importance of establishing rules and standards to ensure women have equal access to economic opportunities, and to create equitable trade policies that ensure women's access to finance and opportunities in global markets.

For South Africans, IWD is a day of resilience by women who are faced with arguably one of the most depressing metrics – the highest incidence of GBV per capita in the world, highest incidence of HIV including adolescent girls, and a range of other such metrics of shame. 

In Southern Africa, according to the latest report on Girl Goals, published by UNICEF, UN Women and Plan International, “adolescent girls and young women aged 15–24 are still twice as likely to not be in education, employment or training, and 9 out of 10 in countries are offline. Globally, 650 million girls and women alive today have experienced sexual violence in childhood, and nearly in five girls are married during childhood.”

President Ramaphosa in his State of the Nation Address  in February assured that “we continue to work across society to end the violence that is perpetrated against women. We have promulgated the National Council on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide Act, establishing a national structure to oversee a coordinated response to this crisis. We continue to strengthen support to victims of gender-based violence.” 

But the nature of the gender inequality and bias beast is ever changing especially using social media. Transparency International reckons that one of the biggest and most overlooked obstacles is corruption, which disproportionately affects women, making it harder for them to access essential services, opportunities and decision-making power. Corruption deepens gender inequalities through sexual corruption (sextortion) – where those in power exploit their position to demand sexual favours – overwhelmingly targets women, trapping them in cycles of abuse. 

Ultimately, gender parity is a mindset issue. The challenge is how to exorcise men claiming to have been hard-wired by both nature and nurture over the millennia, albeit with the help of hormones and those men and women who elect to empower them, from this entrenched mindset!

Parker is a writer based in London