Did Trump Ruin the Workplace?

Three women reflect on the evolution of misogyny

BY MARIN COGAN

Earlier this year, 2016 nostalgia took over social media, with our friends posting wistfully about their more naive selves. The trend quickly ran its course, but that decade, from 2016 to 2026, has seen huge change—for politics, culture, the world. And it made us wonder: What’s different from then to now, particularly when it comes to women’s lives? What have we lost, and maybe gained? We'll be exploring this topic this summer, and we're starting here, with a deep dive on how work and the professional sphere have changed—or not—for women.

A lot can happen in a decade. Around this time ten years ago, Americans were still debating whether to take the new Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, seriously. Global pandemics seemed like old-timey problems; artificial intelligence was still mostly in the realm of science fiction.

The culture back then was different, too. In various industries, women were starting to speak out about workplace harassment and abuse. Others made noise about the chronic lack of representation of women and minorities. The discussions pressed both big companies and individual actors to acknowledge wrongdoing and work towards more just and equitable workplaces.

And then came the backlash: the comebacks, the anti-woke movement, the defamation lawsuits, the assault accusations ignored, the startling rise of the manosphere. Ten years later, we are living in the aftershocks of that era, both the progress made and the retaliation it inspired.

The Meteor spoke with three women–leaders in government, tech, and Hollywood–about what’s changed in their workplaces for women in the last decade, for better and for worse.

 CLAIRE TRICKLER-MCNULTY IN 2022, WHEN SHE CAME TO GENEVA TO PRESENT AT THE COMMITTEE ON THE ELIMINATION OF RACIAL DISCRIMINATION. (COURTESY OF CLAIRE TRICKLER-MCNULTY)

Used to ICE’s Old Boys’ Club, She Became the Target of a Sexist Attack

Claire Trickler-McNulty, a lawyer, served as a Deputy Assistant Director at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Obama and during Trump’s first term, then as an Assistant Director there during the Biden administration. She witnessed dramatic swings in rhetoric and policy between administrations, and ultimately became the target of a deeply partisan investigation by House Republicans, who accused her of trying to push a “woke agenda” inside the agency—claims she says were baseless. Trickler-McNulty is now a policy fellow at Hyphen and co-hosts a podcast called The Melting Pod about immigration.

There were some efforts under Obama, and then under Biden, to encourage the hiring of more female officers. But the whole time I was there, law enforcement was still predominantly male.

If I hadn’t been a lawyer, I would never have been in those rooms. There were definitely parts of ICE that felt like old boys’ clubs—cliques of men where you had no hope of getting into their inner circle of leadership.

When I took maternity leave the second time in 2015, my boss told me…that the real burden of maternity leave is on men, because they have to pick up for women who are taking leave. Which is not what you want to hear from your boss as you're taking maternity leave.

I befriended a lot of female law enforcement officers during my time there. I wanted to support women moving into leadership positions because I knew it was a gendered environment. I saw a number of women–really good, dedicated law enforcement officers–repeatedly passed over for promotions in favor of men.

The women would tell me, “The guys who get promoted are the ones who go drinking with the boys, who go to strip clubs together.” I absolutely saw women get passed over while less qualified men moved up through these networks. That was happening during the Biden administration. It’s recent history.

[But] under the first Trump administration, things changed significantly…It definitely felt like more men were being elevated into leadership positions. A certain clique became more ascendant.

That said, the [changes of the] first Trump administration felt slower to me. It was more like watching sandcastles slowly get washed away. That’s part of why I wanted to go back into government later. There was still so much detention reform work to do, like trying to implement the Prison Rape Elimination Act. I felt like so much of what we had tried to fix had been washed away, and I still had this fire in me to try to fix some of it.

And then, in 2023, I got heavily attacked by the far right.

Part of it absolutely felt gendered. I think I was an easier target because I was a woman on the West Coast with a hyphenated last name.

When I look at younger women coming up now, I do see progress in how they interact with men and set boundaries. That makes me happy. But then I look at what’s happening at the senior levels, and it doesn’t feel like there’s been nearly as much progress there.

I still think about the moments where…women reported harassment and leadership just shrugged. Those are the things I feel guilty about, especially because I was a supervisor. Looking back, I wish I had been less afraid. Less worried about making men angry. Less worried about what they thought about me. More secure in myself and in what I was doing.

TRACY CHOU AT WORK. (COURTESY OF TRACY CHOU)

She’s a Tech Worker Who Started at Google—and Became an Anti-Harassment Advocate

Tracy Chou started her tech career with internships at Google and Facebook before becoming a software engineer at Quora and Pinterest. In 2013, Chou posted a viral Medium post about the lack of publicly available data about women in engineering roles at tech companies. Chou earned media recognition and awards–but also backlash from male colleagues and internet trolls. Later, she founded Block Party, a digital anti-harassment tool.

Quora was this new question-and-answer platform when I was there in 2010-2011, and we needed content for the site. So all of us who worked there were trying to generate content. I found my little niche answering questions about being a woman in engineering.

I had colleagues who really didn't like it and would act out. Sometimes they would try to undermine me, or complain about me [advocating for representation of women.] I had one Asian engineer say to me, “Engineering is the one thing that Asian guys have. Why can't you just let us have it?” And other people who complained to me about how we already lowered the bar so much for women and minorities, do we have to lower it even more?

I felt like I had to overperform as an engineer. I remember getting in super early to the office, working really late, and trying to create that extra space for diversity work on the weekends, so that it wouldn't feel like it was taking away from my main job.

Probably around 2018, my platform had gotten a bit bigger. I started experiencing more pile-ons, but there was still also targeted harassment from individual people who would go pretty deep–I had instances with thousands of trolls on Reddit, and then some of that spilled over onto 4chan, and those people started coming after me too. Then I also had to deal with people who became obsessed with me. There was one guy who was stalking me. He lived internationally but showed up in San Francisco multiple times.

Block Party came directly from the experience of dealing with harassment myself and from having seen it on platforms I had previously helped build. I was frustrated by companies saying, “Abuse and harassment are really hard problems to solve.” I thought: It’s not that hard. I’m sure you can do better than what you’re doing now. I had literally worked on some of these platforms [so I knew it was possible]. And I had also been the target of abuse and harassment myself.

The silver lining is that I was able to take that firsthand experience and turn it into better solutions—not just for myself, but hopefully for other people too.

All the diversity efforts and the MeToo movement impacted the tech industry in similar ways. If you look at computer science enrollment numbers, many more girls are enrolling and graduating with computer science degrees. There are also many more female founders now. The whole ecosystem seems to have improved, and there are many more efforts supporting women in tech, women in VC, women in engineering, and underrepresented minorities more broadly.

I also think the general cultural awareness around these issues has increased dramatically. Ten or 15 years ago, most people didn’t know what intersectionality meant. Now, many people are at least familiar with the concept.

That’s all positive. What’s worse is the recent backlash and demonization of DEI—the fact that people feel so emboldened to be loudly and proudly anti-DEI. I expected progress to be slow. I didn’t expect this level of aggressive backlash.

Still, the work will continue in some way. So overall, I’m still mildly optimistic. But I also feel tired of fighting.

AMY ADRION, RIGHT, ON SET DURING HALF THE PICTURE. (PHOTO BY ASHLY COVINGTON) 

She’s a Director For Whom “MeToo Absolutely Mattered”

Amy Adrion is an Emmy-nominated writer and director. Her 2018 film, “Half the Picture,” examined the experiences with systemic discrimination faced by women directors in Hollywood. She has also directed episodes of Storyline Online, and teaches filmmaking at Rochester Institute of Technology.

I never had any particular instance of sexual harassment or overt discrimination. I worked as a production assistant, as an assistant director, and as a low-level crew member on tons of independent films. I worked for a distribution company in New York at the time when [Harvey Weinstein’s] Miramax was the big player in town. I went to Sundance and all the film festivals. I never personally had a negative experience in my early career in film.

But I do think the issue was less about individual moments of discrimination and more about the fact that the people in power tended to be white men from a certain cohort, and they responded to the stories that connected with them. And so you would have these breakout films by women directors at festivals [and then] you would see them kind of drop out of the cultural conversation after 10 years. I think that is discrimination in a broader sense. The stories that make women, nonbinary, or gender-expansive people feel better about being themselves just haven’t had as many people in positions of power supporting them.

As frustrated as I am by the current state of things, it would be totally disingenuous to say nothing has changed. A lot has changed. You look at the stories that are being made now, and they’re very different from what was in theaters or on television 20 years ago. There is more diversity of voices and stories being told.

Is it enough? No. And it’s frustrating because there was this energy around diversity and hiring different voices–especially around 2020–and it definitely feels like there’s been a backslide. A lot of women directors I know who finally got their first TV episode, or maybe their second, aren’t really getting hired anymore because the business is contracting.

MeToo absolutely mattered. It was an important movement that had a real impact. Harvey Weinstein is in jail. You can’t say it came and went without consequences. It was necessary and important, and it’s had lasting repercussions. That said, I think MeToo also created a lot of discomfort among people in power, and that discomfort led to backlash.

When I started making “Half the Picture,” I interviewed some women who had been part of a group inside the Directors Guild back in the early ’80s who were looking at the numbers of women working as directors and agitating for change. They were probably in their sixties when I interviewed them, and while they were grateful there was renewed attention on discrimination against women directors, they also had this very world-weary attitude of, “Oh, this again.”

At the time, I was very much like, “No, this is different. Things are changing. The ACLU is investigating. Women are speaking out. We’re finally making progress.” And now, 10 years later, I find myself with a much more cautious optimism.

I think human beings naturally assume things just evolve and get better over time—that progress is inevitable. But it’s not. If the last 10 years have taught us anything…it’s that you have to keep fighting for these rights constantly, or they will be threatened or taken away. That was a hard lesson for me to learn in my forties.

The interviews have been edited for clarity and length.

ABOUT MARIN COGAN

Marin Cogan is an independent journalist. She was most recently a senior correspondent at Vox and has worked as a writer for New York magazine, GQ, ESPN the Magazine, and other publications.

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