In Ivanka Trump's Women Who Work, Women Have Disposable Incomes and 'Work' Is an Abstraction

Because work is amorphous, Trump’s advice on how to be a working woman—and particularly a working mother—is both specific to her understanding of labor and also wildly broad. Trump believes that choice is a neutral exercise, rather than action underpinned by resources and financial safety nets: “You chose the kind of work you do, the character of the people who surround you, the type of organization to which you will or won’t devote yourself,” she writes. She advises women to be authentic in the workplace while refraining from oversharing, to negotiate salaries, and to use periods of unemployment to reflect on their goals. (She also recommends that you hire three recruiters to secure a new position.) Trump seems to honestly believe that success naturally follows the dogged pursuit of passion, and so she encourages women to find their passion and pursue it with gusto; to cultivate a culture of success; to effectively lean in. But she does so in phrases softer than even Sandberg’s iconically narrow advice.

Trump believes that choice is a neutral exercise, rather than action underpinned by resources and financial safety nets.

Trump’s examples of the success that comes from pursuing one’s passions are inevitably ludicrous. “One factor in my success has been the doors that my family’s name and my privileged upbringing have opened,” she briefly notes, as she has before, but then adds that “they alone didn’t guarantee my success.” Instead, she attributes her successes (which she lists regularly throughout the book: Trump Hotels’ purchase of the Old Post Office in Washington, D.C., her pivotal role in purchasing the land that is now Trump National in Doral, Florida, and the launch of her fashion brand) to recognizing her passions. Without any sense of apparent irony, Trump’s example of the good that comes from prioritizing passion is an unexpected job offer she received from Anna Wintour at Vogue:

Early one morning during finals, the phone rang…It was Anna Wintour, the editor and chief of Vogue. Anna is someone I’ve always admired; we met when I’d done some modeling as a teenager.

[…]

She’d heard that I was graduating soon. She knew I liked fashion. She wanted to offer me a job at Vogue.

Trump recounts this moment as a hard decision in her life; a momentary conundrum for her since the job was alluring and, as her father told her, “Anna is the best in the business.” Trump writes that she ultimately turned down the job, making a hard choice to pursue her passion of “becoming a builder.”

The vignette is one of the most concrete examples provided in the book. Generally, though, Trump spends much of Women Who Work offering up cliche after cliche: “Living a life according to my passions is really about the journey; there’s no definitive road map or final destination”; “It’s never too late to make a change”; “Your life’s happiness begins with you.” To be charitable, however, Trump is better when she is writing these platitudes than when she offers up personal examples how to succeed or how to cultivate passion. Take, for example, this passage:

I personally love the word curious. I identify with it quite a bit because I am deeply curious, and that’s how I develop my interest in things that ultimately turn into passions for me. For one thing, you have to read, which can trigger lots of interest and ideas. I consume a tremendous amount of information: books, newspapers, trade publications, magazines (that start as pleasure reading but become work related as I’m always tearing out pages and sending them to my team). TED Talks and podcasts are another way I diversify my own information bias and expose myself to bite-sized, snackable bits of information on topics like, say, neuroscience—that I’m never going to read a whole book on but are mind expanding and may trigger an idea.

There is also a whole page devoted to Trump’s Moleskine notebook, where she “jots down miscellaneous things I want to accomplish,” a page on her version of Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journal, and a paragraph devoted to her digital color-coded calendar.

Beyond Trump’s preference for Moleskines and snackable bits of information, you don’t learn that much about her. She feels more like a living press release for her brand than an actual human being. She writes about structuring her time to find work-life balance even as she rejects that phrase (it’s why she needs the color-coded calendar, I guess), but for all of Trump’s insistence that she’s authentic and changing the narrative of working women, she’s unwilling or unable to actually do that. Instead, what Women Who Work offers up is a woman who likes to “hang out” with her family their country home in New Jersey. The garden has berries that her children love; it also has a peach tree and a fig bush. Trump notes in multiple places throughout the book that she loves being a wife and a mother. She also loves “disrupting established industries, like hospitality and fashion, with a fresh vision, and bringing that perspective to businesses, like real estate, that I have loved for as long as I can remember.”

For Trump, authenticity is sharing a photograph that husband Jared Kushner (who she gushes over throughout the book), “candidly snapped of me digging in the garden with the kids in our backyard, my hair in a messy ponytail, dirt on my cheek.” This is Ivanka’s version of empowering women, of proving that, as she writes, “women who work are real.”

If Trump is good at one thing, it’s her mastery of the narrative of women’s empowerment. Changing the “narrative” about working women is “my life’s mission,” Trump writes. She doesn’t bother to note what the existing narrative is, rather, she identifies old stereotypes about overworked and tired corporate women without giving an actual example. Working women are an image rather than a tangible reality. She turns instead to the invisible boogeyman of empowerment writing, namely “the dialogue,” which she describes as “reduced to an outdated, one-dimensional expectation of what a ‘working woman’ should do, how she should act, and what she should look like.” Again, she gives no examples—she recites the facts and figures on the number of women in the workplace and treats “the dialogue” as a kind of tabula rasa; the reader is free to fill in the narrative with whatever she imagines is hindering her own empowerment. Slay queen, Ivanka implies—she just can’t identify what exactly needs slaying other than “the dialogue.”

In fairness to Ivanka, that narrative of empowerment isn’t hers alone. It’s common parlance in many publications targeted to women with disposable incomes: it’s at Refinery29, where women are empowered doing anything the “discourse” says they shouldn’t (wearing a bikini, taking a selfie, etc); it’s in Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, where systemic discrimination is toppled by board room disruption; it’s in Sophia Amoruso’s #GIRLBOSS, where capitalism is wielded as a fundamental feminist expression. The narrative, the lingo of empowerment tells us, is what’s making women’s lives hard. Discourse is the enemy, they argue, but not the structures that produce discourse.

Ivanka Trump might be complicit, and she might even be a monster. But if she is, then the empty lingo of women’s empowerment is her Doctor Frankenstein.