Transition Team’s Request on Gender Equality Rattles State Dept.

By MARK LANDLER

The memo is reminiscent of one the transition team sent recently to the Energy Department, which asked for the names of people who had worked on climate change or attended global climate talks organized by the United Nations within the past five years. That more detailed questionnaire, on the heels of Mr. Trump’s appointment of a climate change denialist to head the Environmental Protection Agency, sowed fears that the Trump administration would purge anyone involved in trying to curb the effects of climate change.

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The latest request drew expressions of concern from advocacy groups and some on Capitol Hill.

“The transition team should clarify their intent,” said Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, in a statement. “I can promise that if the next administration intends to roll back programs designed to lift women up, it will very quickly meet stiff opposition in the Senate.”

The transition team declined a request for comment on the memo. A person answering the phone in the State Department transition office directed inquiries to the public affairs office, which declined to confirm the memo’s existence or to discuss information being sought.

After a slow start, the transition team is accelerating its work to staff the State Department, sending memos requesting information from the rank and file on issues such as the department’s antiterrorism initiative, Countering Violent Extremism.

Mr. Trump has made the fight against the Islamic State central to his foreign policy and has railed against what he said was President Obama’s refusal to use the term “radical Islamic terrorism.” The transition team’s questions have led some in the department to assume that, at a minimum, the program will be renamed Countering Islamic Extremism.

Transition officials are said to be concerned about how many senior jobs in the department will be vacated by departing political appointees. They asked whether there would be anyone to show the secretary of state-designate, Rex W. Tillerson, around his office.

On Wednesday, the State Department press secretary, John Kirby, told reporters that in general terms, the information being sought by Mr. Trump’s team was not out of the ordinary.

“Having gone through a transition myself a few years ago, without getting into detail, I can tell you that the kinds of things, the kinds of material, the kind of information that they are asking for is very much in keeping with what I’ve seen in at least the one previous presidential transition that I lived through when I was at the Pentagon,” Mr. Kirby said.

Secretary of State John Kerry has spoken to Mr. Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, in what Mr. Kirby said was a “nice chat where the secretary had an opportunity to congratulate him.” On Tuesday, Mr. Tillerson met in Washington with Vice President-elect Mike Pence and other senior members of Mr. Trump’s national security team.

Mr. Kerry has tended to champion efforts to counter climate change while at the State Department, but Mrs. Clinton made gender-related issues a leitmotif of her tenure.

In her first year, she created the position of ambassador at large for global women’s issues, appointing Melanne Verveer, who had been her chief of staff when she was first lady. Mr. Kerry kept the post, which is currently held by Catherine M. Russell, a former chief of staff to Jill Biden, the wife of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Some at the department now worry it will be eliminated.

Several of Mrs. Clinton’s showcase projects, like clean stoves for the developing world, had a strong gender component. In travels to El Salvador, India and Pakistan, she gathered female entrepreneurs to discuss their challenges. She often drew a link between the treatment of women and the nation’s security.

“If you look at where we are fighting terrorism,” she said in an interview in 2009, “there is a connection to groups that are making a stand against modernity, and that is most evident in their treatment of women.”

Mrs. Clinton also gave equal benefits and protections to same-sex partners of American diplomats. In an internal memo, she wrote, “Like all families, our Foreign Service families come in different configurations; all are part of the common fabric of our post communities abroad.”

Although Mr. Trump has a record of derogatory comments about women, it is not clear why he would want to roll back the department’s work in this area. News of the memo came the same day he appointed Kellyanne Conway, who managed his campaign, as counselor to the president, making her the highest-ranking woman in the White House.

One of the people on Mr. Trump’s State Department transition team, Erin Walsh, is a former Goldman Sachs executive in Asia who has worked to advance gender issues. At a conference in 2013, she promoted the “10,000 Women Initiative,” a five-year program sponsored by Goldman to provide women with a business and management education.

A senior State Department official said it was possible that the memo was simple fact-finding. But in the current political environment, and given the language Mr. Trump used in the campaign, he said, people were reading the most malign implications into it.

“I can’t believe any of this has been shared with the secretary-designate, because Exxon under Tillerson has been extremely supportive of women’s issues,” Ms. Verveer said. “It’s just really hard to fathom.”

Moreover, Mr. Tillerson was on the Boy Scouts of America’s executive board when the group voted in 2013 to lift the ban on gay scouts.