It’s a curious bit of trivia to note that while Pierre Elliott Trudeau created the Status of Women Canada office, the first three people he appointed to the post were men.

He certainly had an excuse the first time around, when the position was formed in 1971 in response to the Royal Commission on the Status of Women. There was only one female MP that term and she was with the NDP. That wasn’t the case, however, when Trudeau Sr. appointed men to it in two subsequent parliaments.

There’s something of a parallel between this little tidbit and another, more recent item, that’s never really been discussed. When Justin Trudeau won the Liberal leadership in 2013, four of the five candidates he beat were women. All of them had much stronger resumes than him.

Funny that. The guy who, the fairy tale goes, released the nation’s downtrodden women from their shackles by proclaiming “because it’s 2015” only got to his post after elbowing out women far more accomplished than him using his alpha male theatrics and father’s name.

Yet now there are further cracks in this feminist warrior’s breastplate after he shuffled Maryam Monsef from democratic reform minister to head up Status of Women Canada.

She was clearly downgraded for her shoddy performance. There’s no denying that. The main task at democratic reform was to change the way we’ve voted since 1867. No small order. And Monsef blundered it big time. Meanwhile, the big job at Status of Women is ... well there is no big job. (More on that in a moment.)

Now people have questions. Does this mean Trudeau doesn’t take the Status of Women gig seriously? Or that he doesn’t actually value women’s issues?

But they’re two different questions. Ones that are at odds with each other. The truth is anyone who does believe in gender equality should think it’s about time they closed shop at this retrograde pseudo-department.

I’m betting Trudeau agrees but, like Stephen Harper before him, just won’t shutter it because of the optics. After all, if he did in fact think it was integral to securing the gender equality he makes a big show of publicly supporting, he’d restore it to its former glory.

The Liberals aren’t reopening the regional Status of Women offices the Conservatives closed back in 2006. At the time there were a whopping 16 of them. Now there are three plus the head office in Ottawa.

“We don’t need to separate the men from the women in this country,” Bev Oda, the minister at the time, said. “This government as a whole is responsible to develop policies and programs that address the needs of both men and women.” No kidding.

The ministerial mandate letter Trudeau sent to Patty Hajdu, Monsef’s predecessor, outlines the post’s role. It’s almost exclusively about hovering over the shoulders of other ministers busy with real files and ensuring that a “gender-based analysis is applied to proposals before they arrive at cabinet for decision-making.”

In other words, the 32-year-old Monsef, who’s never held much of a real job, is tasked with reminding the likes of 45-year-old Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, who was a Crown prosecutor before she became regional chief of the B.C. First Nations, about the challenges faced by women today. What a joke.

Poor Monsef. First she’s assigned the toughest job, then the most needless.

This whole office is of course symbolic. It only has a $30-million annual budget — which is mostly spent on doling out grants to other groups. It’s even slated to slightly decrease under the Liberals’ watch.

But at a time when 6 in 10 of university graduates in Canada are women — to take but one statistic that’s significantly changed since 1971 — is it the right symbolism?

The office has already faced a soft shut down. The only question is who will wind down the rest.

afurey@postmedia.com