By the time Donald Trump and Xi Jinping met at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on Thursday, the bilateral had featured all the expected pomp and pageantry: a meticulously choreographed display of Chinese soldiers, children waving American and Chinese flags, and rows of senior officials and the US’s top business executives.

Conspicuously absent at the table, however, were women from either delegation – a stark visual that quickly drew criticism from observers who saw it as an unmistakable display of patriarchal power.

In a tweet that has attracted over 22,000 likes overnight, Gita Gopinath, an economics professor at Harvard University, wrote: “A painting of the end of meritocracy: A meeting of the two largest economies and not one woman at the table.”

Speaking to the Guardian, Gopinath elaborated on her comments, saying: “We have somehow gravitated back to this idea that what matters is your network and not your capabilities – and that matters [in terms of] whether or not you get a seat at the table.”

She added: “It’s just inexplicable how you end up with a single-gender table, given the many talented women around the world.

Halima Kazem, associate director for Stanford University’s program in feminist, gender and sexuality studies, echoed similar sentiments.

Comparing Thursday’s images to bilateral meetings during Barack Obama’s presidency, Kazem said: “We’ve gone backward. Obama-era US-China summits included women at the table. Now neither superpower thinks women belong in the room where great power politics happens. This isn’t just American failure – it’s a bilateral signal that women’s voices don’t matter in shaping the global order.”

Women seated at previous US-China bilateral meetings during Obama’s presidency included Liu Yandong, China’s then vice-premier, as well as Susan Rice, US national security adviser, and Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state.

Kazem pointed to the type of power being ostensibly signaled by both sides, saying: “This wasn’t about lack of qualified women – both countries have plenty in their diplomatic and security establishments. This was a choice about what kind of authority to project: masculine, militarized, and exclusionary.

“When both superpowers perform power this way, they’re jointly defining what ‘serious’ diplomacy looks like and who gets excluded from it,” she added.

Despite the absence of women at Thursday’s bilateral meeting in the Great Hall of the People, a small handful of women did accompany Trump on his two-day visit to Beijing, including Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law, as well as Jane Fraser, the Citigroup CEO, and Dina Powell McCormick, the Meta president.