"A slap in the face." Trump shuts out all but 1 woman from 42 US attorney jobs

The latest evidence comes in form of the 42 U.S. attorneys Trump has nominated this year — 41 of which are men. In 2009, President Barack Obama’s first 42 nominees included 12 women, according to BuzzFeed.

U.S. attorney positions, as the top law enforcement prosecutors in the country, represent coveted titles. Many of the attorneys who fill those posts move on to elite jobs at top law firms or become judges, which is another reason why the administration’s decision to virtually lock out women from these top tier jobs is so damaging.

“It’s a slap in the face,” Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney in Alabama who was one of Obama’s early nominees, told Buzzfeed. “It’s a statement that this is not a priority.”

As the American Constitution Society, a liberal lawyers group, noted: “The extraordinary statistics for Trump’s U.S. attorney nominees – 97 percent male, 86 percent while male – hearken back to a much earlier era of U.S. history, and are raising serious concerns.”

The group examined Trump’s first round of nominees in July; the statistics haven’t gotten much better since then.

“There has been a striking lack of diversity so far in President Trump’s nominations for federal prosecutors,” Vanita Gupta, a former acting assistant attorney general for civil rights, told the American Constitution Society. Gupta now serves as president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

Indeed, what we’re seeing is a wholesale rollback of equality via White House dictates. In July, it was revealed that that women working at the White House face an enormous pay gap, the type that would have been more common in the early 1980s, when American women were paid 35 percent less than men.

As Shareblue Media noted at the time, “Adopting a kind of “Mad Men”-era approach to hiring, Trump is showering men with senior positions while mostly relegating women to the lower pay scale.”

Of the top 101 paying jobs in the Trump White House, 73 percent were held by men, according to a study by the American Enterprise Institute. And among the very top echelon in terms of the highest-paying jobs, those jobs were awarded to 17 men and 6 women. (During the final year of Obama’s presidency, 9 of the 16 highest paying jobs went to women.)

From the very beginning, Trump’s staffing choices reflected a stark gender bias — sadly predictable but nonetheless retrogressive and maddening.

And it’s not just the White House: This year, while 13 Republican senators huddled to try to figure out the party’s health care agenda, no women were allowed inside.

Trump and his fellow Republicans will surely continue to try to ice out women as much as they can. But women will continue to demand their seat at the table.