All it took was one picture of Trump meeting with an all-male Congressional committee to get the BBC to lump him in the same boat as a country that until 2015 didn’t allow women to vote.
The liberal Twitter mob attacked the White House on March 23 after Vice President Mike Pence tweeted out a picture of President Trump meeting with the House Freedom Caucus. Although Kellyanne Conway was in the room off screen, critics complained that the photo of a meeting about the now-defunct GOP healthcare bill didn’t include any women, but the BBC took it one step further.
In the middle of their story criticizing the White House for the picture, the UK-based news service threw in this irrelevant fact:
“The US is not the only country to have an all-male photograph from the corridors of power sparking debate.
“Last week, an inaugural girls' council in al-Qassim province in Saudi Arabia was condemned when the first pictures showed 13 men on stage, but no women.”
The article then displayed a picture of an all-male panel representing the Qassim Girls Council in Saudi Arabia.
According to the State Department Human Rights Report in 2015, Saudi Arabia has a “pervasive gender discrimination and lack of equal rights that affected all aspects of women’s lives.” The report also states that the June 2015 elections were the first time that “women were allowed to vote and run as candidates” in that country. But the playing field in Saudi Arabia is still far from level: “Women slowly but increasingly participated in political life, albeit with significantly less status than men, in part due to guardianship laws requiring a male escort, restrictions on women candidates’ contact with male voters in this year’s elections, and the ban on women driving.”
