“Believe women” was the defining message of the #MeToo movement. Today, there’s a new one: Erase women.
The Trump administration’s attack on diversity, equity and inclusion has rolled back decades of progress for women, who now face a widening gender pay gap and narrowing employment protections. In the process, discussions about women have become a third rail, a toxic topic that is too politically charged to touch. Companies, universities, law firms and cultural institutions are all expunging references to “women” and “gender,” even under the most benign circumstances.
The Trump administration has defined “illegal D.E.I.” as “programs, initiatives or policies that discriminate, exclude or divide individuals based on race or sex.” But in practice, President Trump’s allies have questioned whether women deserve a place in the work force at all. They have blamed women for last year’s California wildfires and slammed the conservative Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett as a “D.E.I. hire” for a ruling they didn’t like. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is purging the military of senior female officers after complaining that the armed forces had become “effeminate.” Women’s names have disappeared from museums, parks, monuments and even the Arlington National Cemetery.
Terrified of being the administration’s next target, organizations are descending into the realm of the absurd. A researcher focused on maternal health removed references to gender-based discrimination in order to receive federal funding. A medical trade publication warned scientists to avoid words such as “female” and “women” in grant applications. After Senator Ted Cruz of Texas released a list of supposedly “woke” National Science Foundation grants last year, ProPublica found that some were included merely because their project descriptions included words like “female,” as in a female research scientist, or “diversify,” as in the biodiversity of plants.
It’s a fun-house mirror moment. For more than a decade, while reporting on women in the workplace, I’ve seen my inbox clogged with companies boasting about their work championing female employees. But most firms I contacted for this piece begged me to keep them out of it. At a recent event about working women, I asked a room of human resources executives whether their firms’ diversity efforts were continuing, and every hand shot up. When I asked who would talk about it publicly, almost every hand quickly went down. Executives say they fear not just the administration, but also right-wing activists and misogynistic trolls who might target them.
Even companies with excellent track records in promoting women don’t want to mention it. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, the sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev identified several initiatives available to all employees that can actually be more effective than D.E.I. programs in boosting outcomes for marginalized groups. They highlighted the successes of IBM’s formal mentorship programs, Walmart’s training academy and Gap’s family-friendly scheduling options. All three companies recorded increases in the percentage of women and people of color in senior roles.
Just don’t ask IBM, Walmart or Gap to elaborate on those impressive findings. I did. All declined.
It may seem perfectly reasonable, even admirable, for companies to keep their mouths shut as they continue to advance diversity goals. After all, nobody wants to be a target. In previous years, too many companies went overboard, with lots of cheap talk about diversity and not enough action. The problem is that silencing the conversation risks undoing years of progress at a time when women are still underrepresented in business and public life. As women are erased from the narrative, injustices against them go unnoticed.
Already, incidents that in years past would have prompted public outrage are being met with silence. Just last month, in a stunning reversal, the United States for the first time in 70 years refused to sign off on the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women’s annual principles, an anodyne set of statements including a reaffirmation of its “commitments to gender equality” and a call to repeal “gender discriminatory provisions.” A U.S. representative to the U.N. slammed them as “gender ideology.”
My guess is that you haven’t heard about this historic repudiation. It’s not your fault: It got almost no public attention.
Firms are even cutting funding for employee resource groups — affinity groups centered on women, ethnic and racial minorities or L.G.B.T.Q. communities — despite the fact that many aren’t in the administration’s cross hairs. In previous years, companies “would brag about what they’re doing,” Shelley Correll, a sociologist at Stanford University, told me. Now, companies are “canceling E.R.G.s that aren’t illegal,” she says. It’s “an overreaction to what even Trump is asking them to do.”
As a result, last year, an annual report on women in the workplace found that women have “less career support and fewer opportunities to advance.” One previous champion of women’s advancement, Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, now says companies need more “masculine energy.”
Other marginalized groups have also been targeted. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, corporations jumped to make grand statements and pledge billions of dollars to combat discrimination. Most of those efforts, including initiatives to boost female employees, turned out to be empty platitudes or just plain failures.
The erasure of women from the national narrative has long been a key strategy authoritarian leaders use to destroy democracies. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has declared that women aren’t equal to men. In Russia, some forms of domestic violence have been decriminalized. And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government has urged women to focus on childbearing, not its large pay gap. A primary feature of the “autocrat’s playbook” is “reversing progress on gender equality and women’s rights,” the Harvard scholars Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks have written.
Now, women’s rights are eroding in the United States. The Trump administration has called for resurrecting “traditional” nuclear families where the mother is a homemaker. JD Vance argued that having more women in the work force results in “unhappier, unhealthier children.” The administration recently sued a Coca-Cola distributor for hosting a women’s retreat, alleging it discriminated against men. Trump allies have even suggested stripping women of the right to vote.
When women mobilize, countries are more likely to be egalitarian democracies. That’s why authoritarians fear women. The rest of us shouldn’t.
Joanne Lipman is a lecturer at Yale University.
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