The number of women in Trump's cabinet is shrinking
What should we learn from Bondi and Noem's dismissal?
There’s this saying that goes, “once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern.”
By that logic, this may still be coincidence — but it’s a revealing one. With the ousting of Attorney General Pam Bondi this week, both of Trump’s fired cabinet members — Bondi and also former Sec. of Homeland Security Kristi Noem — are women. Does it matter that Bondi and Noem were the first to go?
All The President’s Men
As I co-wrote for 538 in 2021, Biden started his administration with a record number of women in his Cabinet, a measly five of fifteen roles: Treasury (Janet Yellen), Interior (Deb Haaland), Housing and Urban Development (Marcia Fudge), Commerce (Gina Raimondo) and Energy (Jennifer Granholm).
As show below, women have largely been excluded from the president’s Cabinet for most administrations, which is why a mere five women serving when Biden came to office was record-breaking [only have data from Carter forward handy, sorry!].
The first ever female Cabinet member was Frances Perkins, who served as Secretary of Labor under FDR, while the State Department saw its first woman when Clinton nominated Madeleine Albright in the 90s. Hillary Clinton would later fill that role under Obama. But the Department of Defense remains all-male throughout all of these administrations (and those before it), as has Veterans Affairs.
Turning to Trump’s second term, notably, while his campaign learned hard into hypermasculine posturing and appeals to men, he matched Biden’s record by also filling five cabinet roles with women — Attorney General (Pam Bondi), Homeland Security (Kristi Noem), Agriculture (Brooke Rollins), Labor (Lori Chavez-DeRemer), and Education (Linda McMahon).
Of course, appointing women to your Cabinet is not enough to suggest an administration is committed to gender equality. Both Noem and Bondi have been some of the most vocal, attention grabbing, and embattled members of Trump’s Cabinet, which is why it may be unsurprising they are among the first to go. But other vocal, attention-grabbing, and embattled cabinet members, like Hegseth (Defense) and RFK Jr. (Health and Human Services), remain — underscoring that who exits power is not random.
Welcomed, Then Sacrificed
If patterns of exit are revealing, then who is allowed to enter (and under what conditions) is equally telling, and I want to start there. In the GOP, women’s inclusion has always been fraught.
The GOP has never been especially welcoming to women, but who it has welcomed has shifted over time. In the 1980s and 1990s, figures like Sandra Day O’Connor and Olympia Snowe—moderates who played by the party’s rules—were elevated. They signaled inclusivity without threatening core power structures.
Today, the party’s preferred women look very different: Marjorie Taylor Greene (until recently), Lauren Boebert, or Laura Loomer. These figures align closely with the party’s hard-right base and thrive on visibility, often at the cost of stability or broader political influence. Moderate Republican women like Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, who are much older than the aforementioned women, are now exceptions, frequently positioned in opposition to party orthodoxy rather than safely within it.
Speaking of coincidences, it’s hardly one that since the post-2010 era, the GOP has nominated far fewer women than Democrats to positions of political power, as they’ve left the moderate era largely behind (see Thomsen’s book, Opting Out of Congress).
As Rebecca Traister has expertly argued, women who aspire to positions of political power in today’s GOP largely must be willing to perform a particular version of femininity that is at once hyper-aggressive, but also polished, and attuned to the tastes of the party’s patriarchal center. Traister’s reporting captures the contradictions that conservative women today navigate: they are expected to project maternal warmth, sexualized beauty, and unquestioning loyalty to male authority, even as they wield political influence. That contradiction is one that a lot of women, even conservative women, are unable to hold, and their numbers are dwindling.
Kristi Noem exemplified the effort to embody all the contradictions. Undergoing a MAGA makeover, which has been the subject of much commentary (e.g., NYT Opinions; NPR’s Code Switch), she transformed from a seemingly once a practical, ranch-raised legislator with a plainspoken Midwestern persona, into a high-gloss figure whose appearance and comportment align with the party’s Trump-era feminine ideal. She now sports long wavy hair extensions, and has more sculpted cheekbones. These aesthetic changes better align her with the optics and fantasies of Republican men in Trump’s orbit. As many have already written (e.g., Marie Claire, NYT, Vox), this makeover is not merely cosmetic; it is performative political labor, signaling loyalty, discipline, and marketable charisma.
Figures like Bondi, though less publicly stylized, navigate similar terrain: to be welcomed into influence within the modern party, a woman must demonstrate both ideological compliance and a mastery of the aesthetic and performative cues that Trump and his allies prize. In other words, the Republican Party’s women are judged not only on what they stand for but on how their bodies and images register within a meticulously policed gender hierarchy.
Despite their contortions, Republican women remain precariously positioned. The very traits they adopt to gain legitimacy in a male-dominated hierarchy — beauty, performative loyalty, hyper-aggression — can be turned against them, exposing them as either too feminine to be taken seriously or too assertive to be allowed power. Their survival depends less on talent or experience than on navigating a shifting set of expectations defined by men who ultimately prioritize male peers.
This explains why, even after mastering the MAGA makeover and bending over backward to signal fealty, women in this sphere are often first to go when the party falters or the spotlight shifts. Their labor — emotional, aesthetic, and political — is consumed to uphold a system that will discard them once they are no longer convenient ornaments. In other words, the more they perform the role assigned to them, the more disposable they become.
I doubt their experiences will serve as a warning to other women who aspire to similar positions of influence, but they should.
As always, I like to end with some story recommendations:
Jason Okundaye. (2026, March 24). “Behind the rise of Clavicular and ‘looksmaxxing’ there are insecure young men who feel they don’t measure up.” The Guardian.
Welcome to hating yourselves, boys. Its Bad!
Nathan Taylor Pemberton. (2026, March 30). “‘‘I Think That MAGA Is Dying’: Inside the Youth Movement at CPAC.” New York Times.
MAGA is dying, and unfortunately being replaced with something far more sinister.
Jessica Grose. (2026, February 2021). “New Dads Aren’t a Waste of Space.” New York Times.
The wave of men talking about masculinity is probably a good thing. But the myth that infants don’t need fathers simply will not die.
Jamelle Bouie. (2026, April 1). “The Birthright Con.” New York Times.
Bouie on revisionism, and the legal scholars working to end birthright citizenship. “The revisionist case rests less on new evidence than it does on Trump’s claim to embody the nation and its desires. If he is ascendant, then the people must want a closed, cloistered society.”
Pamela McClintock and Lily Ford. (2026, March 11). “Can GenZ Save Hollywood?” The Hollywood Reporter.
Going to the movies is cool again. Can someone look into whether Letterboxd has something to do with it??? Those “four favorites” videos are always such a joy to watch. Here are mine: Good Will Hunting, A League of Their Own, Gattaca, Bridesmaids.
This was a great read!!