The flaws in Ivanka Trump's feminism are, by now, well known. Any liberal woman under 35 could probably rattle off the list in her sleep: Her "parental leave" plan didn't provide enough parental leave. Her child care plan didn't actually cover the cost of child care. Her #WomenWhoWork campaign is an ad for dresses and handbags; her dresses and handbags are made at facilities that exploit female workers; her "feminist advocate" stance belies her role in an administration that actively seeks to strip funding and rights from women, and her choice to take a role in that administration (besides being a land mine for nepotism charges, the president is, y'know, her Dad) has enabled her to profit off the presidency.

I'll give you time to catch your breath before we continue. But continue we must, for, alas, there is no true end to the controversies of Ivanka. This week's round of publicity—timed to coincide with the release of her book, Women Who Work— reveals yet another problem with Ivanka's positioning herself as the champion of the working woman. That is: She may not be entirely clear on our human definition of "working."

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A recent excerpt from the book, published by Fortune, reveals the problem in alarming, hilarious detail. In it, Ivanka explains how she has worked to dismantle sexist discrimination in the workplace and stick it to the patriarchy by—get this—posting more baby pictures on her Instagram.

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"I wasn't expecting the overwhelming number of comments I received in response to these candid family snaps," Ivanka muses. "Especially in the first couple of years, I often heard things like, 'It's so inspiring that you're such a hands-on mom and not intimidated to show that part of you,' and 'So amazing! You're not wearing makeup. I'm used to seeing you on The Apprentice in a powerful boardroom setting.'"

The masses duly inspired, Ivanka was moved to consider how she might turn their (oddly scripted-sounding) compliments into, if not meaningful action, then at least good content.

The answer, readers will be shocked to learn, was more Instagram. Specifically, Ivanka worked to "debunk the superwoman myth by posting a photo that my husband candidly snapped of me digging in the garden with the kids in our backyard, my hair in a messy ponytail, dirt on my cheek."

Dirt. On. Her. Cheek!!! Can you imagine? That would never fly in a powerful boardroom setting, such as on NBC's The Apprentice!

Ivanka is not so much "challenging" the expectation that mothers or workers be conventionally pretty and well-groomed as she is promoting it, creating an image of Working Mom Barbie enjoying a wholesome day off.

There are obvious problems here; for one, Ivanka, who has worked as a professional model, looks very different from most working women (or most women) in the United States. Even with a slightly messier hairdo, her Instagram feed still exists for the express purpose of glamorizing her; she's not so much "challenging" the expectation that mothers or workers be conventionally pretty and well-groomed as she is promoting it, creating an image of Working Mom Barbie enjoying a wholesome day off.

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But, though it's easy to point and laugh at Ivanka's tales of fearless photo activism—largely because it reads like what would happen if you fed Gwyneth Paltrow's GOOP to a random-text-generating robot until it went insane—in another bit seemingly destined for viral infamy, Ivanka notes that working on a presidential campaign was tough because "I wasn't treating myself to a massage." The excerpt is also profoundly frustrating, largely because it represents such a missed opportunity.

Ivanka is trying to make a valid point in this excerpt: Women really are taken less seriously at work after they have children. Their earning potential diminishes (while men actually see their pay increase after their first child) and, if they visibly prioritize time with their children over logging extra hours at work (or, God forbid, take time off work to care for their children) they're seen as unprofessional or unreliable. Motherhood stigma is a feminist issue, and it really does leave many women scared to even mention their children around their colleagues. It's just that Ivanka Trump, the woman who got a book deal to educate the American public about that issue, apparently can't conceive of any solutions to the problem that don't involve her own selfies.

This is typical of Ivanka's feminism, which has always been less about providing specific, workable solutions than it is about presenting marketable, aspirational images of Ivanka herself. She's meant to be the Exceptional Woman, the one woman with all the skills necessary to survive and thrive within patriarchy; we're meant to believe that emulating her will serve us better than engaging with the underlying structures that disadvantage women in the first place. Even in her pre-presidential efforts, like her pitch for a never-produced #WomenWhoWork podcast, which was obtained by The New York Times, it's clear that Ivanka's specific feminism focused on image and inspiration over policy. A slide in the pitch deck asserts, "the outdated image of a working woman—frazzled, androgynous and entirely one note—began to crack and an inspiring new image began to take shape." It was never about closing the wage gap. It was about communicating that women with jobs could be as pretty as Ivanka. But it's ultimately no surprise that Ivanka would suffer from a crucial lack of distinction between being and seeming. This is the only experience of work she's ever had: serving as a high-profile brand ambassador for her father, burnishing her own image so as to provide a flattering reflection of his success.

Ivanka's feminism has always been less about providing specific, workable solutions than it is about presenting marketable, aspirational images of Ivanka herself.

In fact, as per a recent New York Times profile, Ivanka learned to look managerial before she ever learned to manage anybody: "Even as Ms. Trump was in her mid-20s, learning her way around financing negotiations and construction details, she played an authority figure on [The Apprentice], weighing in on contestants' merits during the tense boardroom scenes." Similarly, her feminism feels market-tested and insincere because, well, it is; it was literally concocted by her marketing team, who were concerned that Ivanka was "perceived as rich and unrelatable," and saw a promising financial opportunity in the success of Sheryl Sandberg's bestseller Lean In. The #WomenWhoWork brand was conceived not to help working women, but to make Ivanka seem more like a suburban everymom so that she could sell her dresses and accessories to a more downscale mass market. One of the key strategies in that rebranding? You guessed it: "Ms. Trump was told to post more down-to-earth pictures on her Instagram feed—less made-up model, more mommy." Ivanka's baby pictures and dirt selfies weren't an act of feminist resistance. They were ads.

In reality, women dealing with workplace discrimination need practical solutions more than they need social-media #inspo. But Ivanka's only concrete advice for women struggling to find work-life balance, is to—well, be Ivanka. At the very least, they should be able to employ a fleet of never-mentioned nannies to whisk their children into the office for "business lunches," and/or be bosses operating at near-Ivankan levels of power: "If you're in charge, share the fact that you're leaving to pick your daughter up from school in order to create a culture in which others feel comfortable doing the same," she instructs us, before going on to cheerfully note that she's accommodated her own daughter's visits to the office by installing "a kids' desk that folds out of the wall, complete with treats, toys, colored pencils, and markers." Granted, this is one small excerpt of a much longer book. But in the portion we have available, regular employees—women who can't design their own hours and/or bring construction crews into the office for special projects—receive no advice on how to change their workplace culture. They simply have to wait for change to happen from the top down.

Women dealing with workplace discrimination need practical solutions more than they need social-media #inspo.

This isn't the voice of a #WomanWhoWorks; it's the voice of a #WomanWhoSupervisesOtherWomen. Again, it betrays something real about the way Ivanka Trump sees feminism—or doesn't see it. Before her rebranding, "Ms. Trump had not seemed especially focused on gender politics or policy." According to a former employee, Marissa Kraxberger, she initially refused to extend the benefits she promotes to her employees, telling Kraxberger that "we don't have maternity leave policy here; I went back to work one week after having my child, so that's just not something I'm used to." The issue wasn't resolved by inspirational culture change from a benevolent boss; female employees worked together to push for a change in policy until the company instituted a two-month paid leave program. Tips on how to engage in this type of organizing are missing from Ivanka's vision of workplace progress, presumably because the results are highly inconvenient for Ivanka.

Ivanka's out-of-touch-ness seems like typical social media snark bait—laughing at the lifestyles of the rich and oblivious between bites of 99-cent microwave burrito in our cubicles, as is our right in Democracy—until you realize that the woman who has no understanding of "work" or "feminism" outside of her own marketing copy is providing the Trump administration's solutions for both. It matters that Ivanka Trump's policies for advancing workplace equality are so poorly thought out. It matters that they don't help anyone other than the few, rare women who operate at Ivanka's level of wealth and inherited privilege, and who probably don't need much in the way of government assistance in the first place. It matters because, given Ivanka's track record, those policies were likely never intended to help: All the flaws and insufficiencies make sense, if you consider that advancing those policies is still just part of a social-media marketing plan, aimed at making Ivanka seem "likable" to working women rather than actually improving those women's lives in any measurable way.

"Together," Ivanka assures her readers in the Fortune excerpt, "we will debunk the caricature of what it looks like to be a 'working woman.'" But for most women—the sort of women who have struggles aside from "not getting massages" and "stocking their child's custom-built in-wall work desk"—the problem is not "what work looks like." The problem is what work is. Ivanka, raised in the hall of mirrors as she has been, has never experienced those sorts of problems, and doesn't even seem capable of imagining them. Under the reign of her Instagram-filter feminism, the real obstacles women face are unlikely to ever change.

Sady Doyle Sady Doyle is the author of 'Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear ...

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