A new analysis shared exclusively with the Guardian has found 80% of nominations for top jobs in the Trump administration have gone to men

They were military and business leaders, political insiders, novices and lords of finance. But the parade of job seekers to Trump Tower last winter almost all had one thing in common: they were men.

The work of staffing the federal government has since lost its casting-call quality, but little appears to have changed.

A new analysis shared exclusively with the Guardian has found that 80% of nominations for top jobs in the Trump administration have gone to men – putting Donald Trump on track to assemble the most male-dominated federal government in nearly a quarter-century.

Without a significant shift, men will outnumber women four-to-one in top positions of the Trump administration.

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By contrast, men in government outnumbered women three-to-one during the first term of George W Bush, and there were two women for every five men in government during the Clinton and Obama administrations, according to a 2013 New York Times analysis of all appointees, Senate approved or not.

“If you’re not intentional about it [diversity], it won’t happen,” said Don Gips, who served as the White House personnel director for the first six months of Obama’s presidency.

The Obama, Bush and Clinton administrations, Gips said, all made efforts to pick administration officials who “looked like America” in terms of their race, gender and viewpoints, and under Obama, geography. But doing so took work. “There’s always a government in-waiting who want to come in, and unfortunately, they often are mostly white men.”

The 80% figure comes from an analysis of 408 political nominees Trump has sent to the Senate for approval – 327 men and 80 women. The Senate has confirmed 129 of those nominees, and a handful are holdovers from the last administration.



American Bridge 21st Century, a progressive Super Pac that monitors Republican candidates, provided the Guardian with data on the gender of Trump’s nominees.

The White House has the power to name other administration officials without the Senate’s input. But the presidential appointees who require Senate approval represent the top echelons of the federal government – cabinet secretaries, but also the under-secretaries, directors and commissioners who drive policymaking at scores of federal agencies. From scores of officials within the Department of Defense to the tiny National Council on Disability, these appointees have sway over almost every issue before the government.

White House officials did not respond to questions about the gender breakdown of Trump’s appointees or any efforts by his transition team to take gender diversity into account.

The new numbers could draw fresh criticism for an administration that has already stuffed its inner ranks with white men. Although his transition team vowed that Trump’s nominees would “be very broad and diverse, both with the Cabinet and the administration”, Trump would go on to choose a cabinet with a smaller proportion of women and nonwhites than any president’s first cabinet since Ronald Reagan.

Just days into Trump’s presidency, a photo showed him flanked by half a dozen men as he expanded a ban on international aid for groups supporting abortion rights.

Trump is not the only president to disproportionately staff his administration with men. Obama attracted scorn for filling 60% of political positions with men in his first term, and for passing over women for several high-profile cabinet appointments.

Still, Obama placed women in high positions of power at agencies, like the treasury department, with reputations for being boys’ clubs. And a person familiar with appointments under Obama said his administration made a conscious attempt to nominate individuals of many different backgrounds and sought to build pipelines that would keep diverse groups represented in the White House.

The efforts aren’t just about checking off a box, said one proponent of women in government.

“It’s difficult for people to extrapolate beyond their life experiences to make good policy,” Victoria Budson, executive director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard University, told the Guardian. “And yet every member of the cabinet is responsible for making sure their policies are effective for the whole country. So you want a mix of experiences and background and talents and skills to help us solve the complex problems facing the country.”

By any measure of the Trump administration, that mix is predominantly male.

Three-quarters of the names on the list appear in a Washington Post database of Trump nominees to “key positions”; American Bridge compiled the names of additional nominees from congressional records, White House press releases and responses to Freedom of Information Act requests for staff lists.

Men also outnumbered women three-to-one in a separate group of about 400 people the administration hired as it transitioned into power, according to a Bloomberg analysis using data collected by ProPublica. These were appointees who did not require Senate confirmation.

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Only one of Trump’s 42 nominees for US attorney is a woman. (There are 93 US attorney positions around the country.) And none of the four women in Trump’s cabinet is a member of the inner cabinet – the circle of appointees who are traditionally closest to the president – or near the front of the line of presidential succession.

Beyond his cabinet, the role Trump has played in directly creating the gender imbalance is unclear; transitions differ between presidents. Under George W Bush, the White House Office of Presidential Personnel wielded more influence that cabinet secretaries over nominations; under Obama, the reverse was true.

But both teams, Gips said, made efforts to attract and appoint women.

“Having that diversity helps bring new ideas and new thinking into government to make sure we’re not looking at policy through a narrowly focused lens shaped only by our own perceptions,” he said. “We’re still a democracy. We still should represent the views of all Americans.”

Budson noted that recent history is blighted with examples of male policymakers treating gender like an afterthought, only to undermine their own goals.

Social security benefits, for example, are largely a function of a person’s income and time in the workforce. Because women are paid less, live longer, spend more years out of the workforce as caretakers and are more likely to work jobs that aren’t eligible for benefits, women are much less likely than men to receive adequate pensions. Partly as a result, elderly women are one of the largest groups of Americans living below the poverty line.

Trump still has hundreds of nominations to go. The president has put forth nominees for only a third of the 1,200 or more positions across government that are appointed by the president and require Senate approval, and his appointments are happening at record low-speeds.

But critics of the administration are skeptical the gender balance of his administration will change.

“The Trump administration does not value women,” said Emily Aden, the rapid response director for American Bridge. “This is just the latest proof.”