President Donald Trump is headed to Beijing (1) for his first state visit to China since November 2017, but he’s not going alone. He’s invited 17 of America’s most powerful business leaders to join him on the trip. Notably, just two of them are women.
The delegation accompanying Trump for high-stakes talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping includes Citi CEO Jane Fraser (2) and Meta President and Vice Chairman Dina Powell McCormick (3) — the only women alongside 15 male chief executives from Apple, Tesla, Boeing, Goldman Sachs, Blackstone and a dozen other companies.
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Notably absent are women running other large multinationals with significant China exposure, including General Motors’ Mary Barra, AMD’s Lisa Su and Accenture’s Julie Sweet. The White House has not publicly explained its selection criteria and it did not immediately respond to Moneywise’s request for comment.
The two women in the room
Fraser, who took over Citigroup in March 2021 (4), remains the first and only woman to lead a major Wall Street bank. Her presence carries weight: Citi has spent recent years winding down its consumer banking footprint in China while maintaining its institutional and corporate banking ties, putting Fraser in a delicate position as Washington and Beijing spar over capital flows, semiconductor restrictions and tariffs.
Powell McCormick joined Meta in early 2024 after more than a decade at Goldman Sachs and a stint as deputy national security advisor in Trump’s first administration. She is notably the only person joining Trump on his China trip who is not a CEO — she is Meta’s president and vice chairman, reporting to Mark Zuckerberg — but she is a former White House official, having served under Trump during his first administration, with direct experience negotiating in Beijing.
The other 15 attendees include Apple’s Tim Cook, Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon and Boeing’s Kelly Ortberg.
Echoes of Trump’s 2017 delegation
During Trump’s last China trip in November 2017, he traveled to Beijing with roughly two dozen executives for a state visit the White House said produced $253 billion in commercial deals (5) — figures analysts later questioned as largely non-binding letters of intent. That delegation, which included Boeing, Goldman Sachs and Qualcomm executives back again this week, was a considerably larger group of 29 individuals (6), but notably all of them were men.