Ivanka looks for the feminist side of Trump
When Ivanka Trump took the stage at the Republican National Convention Thursday night and pledged that her father would support working mothers, it was one of the few times the campaign has addressed the issue in the year Donald Trump has been running for president.
“Politicians talk about wage equality, but my father has made it a practice at his company,” Ivanka said. “He will work for equal pay for equal work, and I will fight for it too, right alongside of him.”
She went on to suggest that her father would “change the laws and focus on making quality child care affordable and accessible for all.” At the Trump Organization, she said, to the loudest applause in her speech, “women are paid equally for the work that they do, and when a woman becomes a mother, she is supported, not shut out.”
But these central themes of Ivanka’s speech — equal pay, maternity leave or childcare — do not appear on the Trump campaign website and are not part of the candidate’s usual stump speech. Nor do they figure much, if at all, in the Republican Party platform.
So let’s look at Trump’s history with these issues.
As a businessman, Trump has notably hired women for positions that traditionally were done by men — putting a woman in charge of the construction of Trump Tower, for instance. But there have also been allegations that these women had to put up with comments about their appearance and remarks that may have passed for jocularity at one time but would now likely be considered harassment.
As for equal pay, Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, said last fall that he did an internal tally of the number of women in high-level jobs in the Trump Organization, and while he will not release the details he says the result is parity: 57 percent men, 43 percent women, and rough equality in pay.
But a review this spring of the Trump campaign staff by the Boston Globe finds a different picture. Using the Trump campaign’s April payroll report to the Federal Election Commission, Globe reporters found that women were only 28 percent of the staff and they earned 35 percent less on average than the men. (A similar review of the Clinton campaign found it was 53 percent women and salaries were essentially equal.)
Clinton has said she favors the Paycheck Fairness Act to alleviate the pay gap that Ivanka cited in her speech. Trump has said he favors equal pay for women, but also said he doesn’t believe there really is a gender gap in wages.
There is similar murkiness on the subject of maternity leave. Ivanka said from the podium that women were supported at the Trump Organization when they became mothers, but it is unclear what that support entails. Several calls by this reporter over the months to establish exactly what the company’s maternity leave policy says were met with no comment. “This is a private company,” Cohen told me, “We do not have to release that information.”
And Trump certainly has not been a champion of subsidized childcare, which Ivanka described as central to enabling mothers to hold a job. When asked about it on the campaign trail by a voter recently, he answered “I love children” and “It’s a big subject, darling.”
In fact Trump’s strategy for winning over working women doesn’t seem to rely on specific policies, but rather deploying Ivanka to convince them there actually is a policy. Trump divorced Ivanka’s mother, Ivana, when she started paying too much attention to her work, but he seems very proud of his ambitious daughter, an executive vice president of the Trump Organization and the namesake head of her own fashion brand.
Ivanka’s speech seemed intended to transitively impute these values to her father, implying that if he raised her to be a strong, independent woman then clearly he supports strength and independence in women. And, in fact, people on both sides of the aisle agree that Trump’s children are notable for their seeming stability and work ethic, qualities not always evinced in the offspring of billionaires.
But there are questions about how big a role Trump played in rearing his children. He divorced Ivana when they were 13, 9 and 7, and his older son, Donald Jr., who found out through the tabloids that his father was having an affair with Marla Maples, is said to not have spoken to Donald for several years. Tiffany, his daughter with Marla, lived in California with her mother after their divorce. And Melania has said that she is the hands-on parent with son Barron. Donald doesn’t do things like read bedtime stories or change diapers — something unlikely to change if he becomes president.
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(Cover tile photo: J. Applewhite/AP)
