 It's my great pleasure, shortly, to introduce Professor Han Towns, our speaker this evening, and also Professor Conway in the front here, who will speak as a respondent to Professor Towns' remarks. If you stay with us till 7 o'clock, there is a drink's reception outside, but if you leave early, you're not allowed to steal a bottle on your way out. That would be mean. I'm not trying to give you any ideas there. So, Han Towns is the first inaugural recipient of a prize at the International Studies Association in the Diplomatic Studies section, which so us is part of, in the name of Berta Lutz, and this lecture, which I think will now become an annual lecture of the prize winners, is designed to cut a long story short to make Berta Lutz as well known as Eleanor Roosevelt, because whereas Eleanor Roosevelt did many, many extraordinary things in the interests of feminism at home and abroad, at the end of the day, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, although it has achieved the status of customer international law, was in a general assembly document, and much to the relief of many civil servants didn't have the binding force of law. However, Article 8 of the UN Charter, which specifies gender equality in the UN, and by extension much more widely, of course, does have legal force in the UN system, and as a result of the work of predecessors, predecessors generations of students at CISD, we uncovered the hidden story that the single most important reason why there is gender equality in the UN Charter is because of a Brazilian diplomat, Berta Lutz, who was sent by her government to achieve gender equality in the negotiations of the UN Charter in 1945 at San Francisco, and we have all felt this is a rather important fact, and indeed the diplomatic core of Brazil had forgotten, many of people in political circles in Brazil had forgotten, and indeed, if you ask any professor, any feminist professors, the question, how did gender equality get into the Charter, people will go on the Roosevelt question mark, and we thought, well, let's see if we can endow a prize at the international studies association in the name of Berta Lutz, and this will start to proselytise the idea of who is Berta Lutz, what does she do, why is she important, and so forth, and the prize is for writing on women in diplomacy, and that of course has come a long way since Berta Lutz, and now we have some states with feminist foreign policies, and a long way since the conversation that Lutz records in her memoirs where she went to San Francisco and met with the women delegates from the United Kingdom and the United States who informed her that she should not ask for anything as vulgar as gender equality in the Charter and be content with the understanding that men meant women, and as she said at the time and in the conference, men has never meant women and it weren't now, and went on with her campaign, so that was the idea for the prize, and I'm absolutely delighted that the prize works so well that we have Anne Towns here with us today. Anne Towns is a professor in political science at the University of Gothenburg, she is the PI, research leader on the gender and diplomacy programme of the very, and is a very prestigious Wallenberg Academy fellow, in addition to her small honour with respect to the Berta Lutz prize, the Wallenberg Academy fellowship I think runs into very large sums of money beyond the reaches of the centre. Anne received her PhD in political science and feminist studies at the University of Minnesota in 2004, has served as associate editor of the international studies quarterly, and a member of the editorial boards of Cambridge studies in gender and politics, international studies review and politics and international politics. She has also served on various sections and committees indeed of the international studies association, her research centres around questions of norms, hierarchies and resistance in international politics, usually with a focus on gender. She is the author of women and states, norms and hierarchies in international society, an editor of gendering diplomacy and international negotiation. Her articles have been published in journals such as international organization and the European Journal of international relations. Her work has received multiple awards from sections within the international studies association and the American political science association. As principal investigator of the gender program and research group, she is currently conducting a large research project on gender dynamics in diplomacy, an interstate institution that has long been dominated by men, but where more women have entered within the past decade. After she has concluded her remarks, the respondent will be Orobarissa Conway, who founded the Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy in London and also now has a German branch after graduating in gender studies from SOAS. I am pleased to say that gender studies and the diplomacy section are now combined in SOAS's School of International Studies. So without more ado, and with another reminder to hang on for the drinks, can I hand over to Ann? Thank you very much. Well thank you. Thank you to Dr Plash and for the Centre of International Studies and Diplomacy for inviting me here and thank you to all of you for coming here on a Monday night to listen. It's my privilege really to be here to get to talk about this research program, which is a few years in, so we're kind of midway I think in terms that we've started asking a bunch of questions. We don't really have all the answers, but I'll try to tell you why those questions are so important, why I think we think they're so interesting and give you some answers I think to some of the questions at least. So this evening I'll tell you a bit about what makes gender and diplomacy an interesting research arena, like why is this an area that needs research? Also how we at Jandib, how we approach this research problem and what we're doing, you know, talking a little bit about the fact that we were studying what diplomats do, people that are officially designated as representatives of states, so not diplomacy in the kind of widest sense, right, but in a narrow formal sense, the diplomats that do the diplomatic work of states. And then hopefully I'll get to some of the findings and the analyses that we've done at the end. I have my, I see there's no clock here, so I can't really time myself, I have my cell phones, so I'll try to keep this within the 40 to 45 minutes that I was allotted. So I'll skip this, let me tell you a bit about the Jandib research program for starters before we get to the questions and what it's actually about. So I'm the PI then of this program, gender and diplomacy research program at the University of Gothenburg, which is now three years in the making. At this point it's a six year program, I have funding for six years, I'm hoping to extend that, so I'm, you know, in addition to the grants we have already, we are applying for more, so hopefully this will be something that's ongoing and that will grow with time, right, so my aim is to extend this beyond the group that we have now. So the program consists of this core small research group with me, there are two associate professors at the University of Gothenburg, a PhD student, a range of master's students, we have research assistants, we have visiting scholars, if there's anyone interested that's working on gender and diplomacy, you're more than welcome to apply to see if you can stay with us for a bit and do research at Gothenburg. We do a range of different kinds of research on diplomats, we're putting together a database for instance on ambassador appointments, we're assembling data on where women and men are in specific ministries from foreign affairs, we do interviews, we have retrieval of archival materials, we do some observations, it's kind of a broad range of data and approaches to studying gender and diplomacy. There's also a GenDip research network, so GenDip is trying to be a hub between, because there's popping up more and more scholars around the world, they're studying gender and diplomacy now, so we're trying to be kind of a hub for that, so if any of you are working on gender and diplomacy I would also encourage you to get in touch to see if you can be part of the network, we have ongoing, we have panels, sections, their workshops and so forth, so it's a way to bring scholars together so that there can be some dynamic among those of us that are working on this kind of new topic. We're launching a list serve the next month or so too, so if you're interested in the topic too you can sign up for that and you'll be part of the loop kind of of the things that are ongoing. So far we have a range of publications but the major publications haven't really come out yet, so we have kind of some agenda setting pieces, so I have a book, Paul Grave, an edited volume in their diplomacy series that's on gendering diplomacy and international negotiation, which is accompanied by an article in the International Feminist Journal of Politics that's trying to set the agenda for why we should study this stuff and why it's so important. So let me get to that, like what the research challenge is. So diplomacy as you're probably well aware is a basic institution of international politics. I mean on the one hand we have military and the use of force and then there's diplomacy as the interaction between states by peaceful means with its infrastructure then of embassies, diplomats and so forth. But whereas there's an enormous literature on gender in the military and we know a lot about the gender dynamics of the military, there's so much less on diplomacy, there's virtually nothing at all until very recently, which is really odd. Because diplomacy like the military has a very male dominated history. Ministries for foreign affairs have been much more male dominated than most other state institutions. So when state office opened for women in the early 20th century there were generally two exceptions where women could not enter. There was diplomacy on the one hand and military on the other hand. Just like the military, diplomacy has been very slow to open up to women. Some states started opening up their diplomatic training programs for women in the around 1918 Brazil for instance in the 1920s. UK, Sweden and other states did not do so until 1946. Many states did so even later well into the 60s and many states when they opened up for women they placed new barriers for women so they placed a marriage ban specifically on women diplomats. So whereas male diplomats were expected to marry right and the diplomatic spouse was expected to travel with a male diplomat and do unpaid labor right that she was supposed to host these receptions and hold dinners and be their informal eyes and ears of her husband. Female diplomats weren't allowed to marry at all. If they married they had to leave the profession so it's a very unequal kind of professional field for male and female diplomats. That marriage ban was not lifted until the early 1970s. I think Australia might have been forced in 1969 or something like that. Some southern states never had such a ban. So Turkey never had a marriage ban for instance. It's not as if every state had them but from what I've seen so far many western states had bans on women that women were not allowed to marry. So they were lifted late in the 1970s and it's not really until the mid to late 1990s last two decades or so that we see a lot more women in larger numbers entering into diplomacy. Some ministries of foreign affairs like Sweden and the UK for instance have had gender parity since the 1990s. Others are seeing dramatic increases now so their campaigns, active recruitment of women into career diplomacy in a range of states. Japan, United Arab Emirates, a range of other places are trying actively to recruit more female diplomats. So what we have then is we have an institution that's been very heavily male dominated for a long time. And then we have a relatively quick surge of women in the last two decades especially in some ministries from foreign affairs. We also have some teeny tiny movement towards opening up space for transgender persons in diplomacy. That's not exactly a huge movement but it's happening. And we know from prior gender scholarship that institutions that have been male dominated they tend to become masculized. It smears off like it matters whether those are designated male or in an institution or female and so forth. We also know that when there are rapid changes in the gender makeup of institutions all these complex adjustments have to be made. New gender patterns might emerge. So I think at this moment it gives us an excellent opportunity to ask some very basic questions about gender in diplomacy. So the research challenge I think for all of us that are interested in this is really an opportunity that there is so little scholarship on gender and diplomacy in political science in particular. So to be sure there's a thriving literature in diplomatic history in the field of history there is quite a bit of work. But on the contemporary era within international relations or political science there's virtually nothing. Since I started this program a few people have started doing work on this so there will be more work coming out but there's really nothing as of yet so we still know next to nothing about how gender works kind of in contemporary diplomacy. So the field is wide open for people to ask questions ranging from undergrads to master students and other parts of the field. So one of the main challenges that I found myself with is basically where to start. I mean usually when you enter into a research arena there's an ongoing conversation and you can fit yourself into it but here in a sense there's nothing on diplomacy so what kinds of questions do you ask first? What do you do? How do I approach this field? To what debates in IR and gender studies more broadly do I address these questions? I'm still wondering a bit. I'm situating this work I think kind of closely then for given reasons within diplomatic studies within international relations and diplomatic studies as you might know has recently become a very thriving field within IR. Not least because of the so-called practice turn which you might have heard of also with this attention to the everyday to the mundane mundane and embodied practices of actors at the micro level so looking at what actors and diplomats do in the everyday right like how international politics is done on the ground level. This practice turn has obvious parallels in the longer tradition of feminist IR scholarship which has also focused on the micro level on the mundane on embodied practices and also in the critical tradition in IR more generally. So my project then shares many points of departure with this micro turn or the turn to the local the practice turn. I think it's absolutely necessary to look at how diplomacy is practiced in the everyday on the ground right but that said I also you know placed myself in that tradition with a couple of reservations and first I think there's a danger in some practice turn in some kind of local turn or micro turn oriented work to become myopic at times because in focusing on the micro you sometimes lose track of broader patterns so the potential at least broader patterns across time and space right. So I think there's a need also to zoom out a bit to try to piece together analyses to say something bigger right a bigger picture across somewhat somewhat larger swaths of time and space and second I think in the turn to the micro there's a tendency in each study to focus on one kind of action of one side of practice so we have studies that are on tweeting in diplomacy or the use of track changes in documents in diplomacy or negotiation styles on emotional labor and so forth right and those I think this is wonderful because this produces really carefully crafted studies that drill very deeply into one set of practices within diplomacy but there's a danger I think again in compartmentalizing what diplomacy is into individualized specific practices right so that we end up with very fragmented knowledge right unless we make some connect attempt to connect all these practices and trying to think of them together in some way so my aim then is to see whether and how all these multitude of different kinds of gendered practices might cohere and what each practice might mean in the context of others I'm not there yet so unfortunately I can't give you that big picture answer but that's the aim of the project is to try and think of like be very careful and specific be yet try to think of how these practices fit together right into broader patterns so much like Sylvia Llechner and Mervyn Frost if you've seen their recent engagement with the practice turn I prefer to work with the concept of an institution in other words a broader and possibly more coherent context that provides a meaningful framework for interaction right so and doing that instead of calling it kind of practices I'm attempting to understand gender in diplomacy in more systematic terms as some form of I mean it's unstable and it's in process but it's still some sort of system of rules and norms rather than focusing on specific forms of action so to try to get a grip on how gender works in diplomacy then I think it's necessary to look at multiple dimensions and try to think of how they fit together gender as you might know is extraordinarily adaptive right as a chameleon like flexibility it shifts an importance and effects from context to context right so my working assumption is that gender is dispersed across different forms of action it operates in different ways and yet we can't think of ways in which they hang together structuring diplomacy in a way that enables us to think of it as an institution something that coheres in some way so to organize the research then I found the classic work of Joan Acker if you know her she's a feminist sociologist really helpful as a start she has done work on gendered institutions and I used the institution in two ways on the one hand you know formal institution and established formal organization with clear aims and rules right like an organization but on the other hand an institution can also be less formalized but nonetheless sustained ongoing practices right so it can be formal organizations like the ministries of foreign affairs on the one hand or it can be formalized interactions between diplomats root nice interactions so diplomacy can be understood as a gendered institution I think in both of these ways so I'm just going to go through this really quickly so you can see the different kinds of practices and different kinds of things we can look at when we talk about diplomacy as a as a gendered institution so in Acker's classic formulation to say that an institution is gendered and I'm going to quote for her means that quote advantage and disadvantage exploitation and control action and emotion meaning and identity are patterned through and in terms of a distinction between male and female masculine and feminine and also between masculinities or between femininities so gender is not in addition to ongoing institutional processes conceived as gender neutral rather gender is an integral part of those processes which cannot be properly understood without an analysis of gender so gender is part and parcel of what an institution is from this perspective right it's also a process and it's power laden and within institutions there are at least four interacting processes or dimensions that can be distinguished right so on the one hand we can talk about hierarchical divisions of labor right this refers to the locations and physical space and to formal organizations right in terms of positions of power positions of subordination so this is pretty obvious I think even to casual observers it doesn't take a lot of kind of gender theoretical infrastructure to to see this right so we can ask very simple questions where are men and women and non-binary persons if there are any right in the formal posts of diplomacy how many men and women are there in diplomacy where are they located within the ministry's foreign affairs among ambassadors in terms of positions of power right or their patterns in terms of where the men and women and non-binary folks are in diplomacy okay are men overrepresented in hardship positions and militarized postings or women underrepresented in positions of power and prestige as we might expect those are some basic questions we can ask how has this changed over time second way to ask about diplomacy as a gendered institution is to look at symbols and images as those are constructed and reproduced within the institution okay and these are symbols in the language of acor symbols and images that explain express reinforce sometimes oppose the divisions of labor that we see in the first dimension here so in diplomacy we can ask questions about for instance how diplomacy is gendered in terms of how it's represented and talked about how is the figure of the diplomat represented okay in what ways has the male dominance of diplomacy manifested in masculinisation of diplomacy in the sense of what kinds of adjectives what kinds of terms what kind of attributes that we attribute to the diplomat we can also ask questions about whether and what kinds of symbolic roles women and men and play as diplomats and ambassadors and so forth so this is a whole terrain of research questions here to be asked to about gender rhetoric symbolic representation okay third the third dimension of institutions are interactions and relations right between women women and men between women and women between men and men and so forth right including all those patterns that enact dominance and submission so here we're getting to the actual practices like how the behaviour actions right acor mentions things like conversation analysis showing how genders expressed in things like interruptions turn taking at meetings who listens to whom who gets to talk for how long who gets reinforced when they're speaking and so so forth right in the flow of the ordinary every day of of doing diplomacy i would add that interactions can also be thought of in terms of gender and social networks right i mean just a classic there's a lot of research and other venas on kind of old boys networks versus women's friendships right those are kind of the stereotypical networks that that tend to emerge in other institutions and those are questions again they're excellent to post a diplomacy diplomacy is all about relations and networks right that's at the centre of diplomacy is so we can ask very basic questions here too about the gendered character kind of of these interactions and relations and then forth and finally we can ask questions about identities of those that occupies of diplomats right those that that become the agents of diplomacy so acor says that these processes help to produce gendered components of individual identity which may include consciousness of the existence of the first three right our diplomats gender conscious that's the very basic questions to ask about this and here i would say it depends many are not at all some are very right um but it can also have to do with things like how you perform gender right in your choice of clothes what does it mean to be a diplomat if you're a woman or a man in terms of behaviorism or behaviors i mean language the presentation of self right you can ask questions about the gender components of this right how do they understand appropriate languages how do they resist and maneuver gender norms and scripts and so forth so if we think about all these four dimensions together i find that a very helpful kind of initial entry into since we don't know much about diplomacy at all i think we need to do all these things right and we need to try to think about them together how do these things work how do they reinforce one another right rather than focusing on one thing or the other because then we tend to get a distorted too narrow of you right and it might also seem sometimes that gender might not matter that much if you just focus on one little sliver right but to me i think that the important thing is looking at like across all these different ways of of reproducing gender right like what is the what's what's the systematic story here so for the rest of this talk now oh i should say also that one you know i don't just here look at like male female the nexus of the male masculinities and femininities right there are other hierarchies that work always when when we do gender analyses so there's an intersection obviously with things like racial hierarchies with hierarchies of sexuality right with hierarchies of class and so forth so those enter into the analysis but i can't say exactly in what way systematically yet because i'm not far along in the analysis to give you kind of a i'm doing it exactly this way right but in the i mean in the analysis as they emerge those components are always part and parcel of the analyses and then i also want to say that a highlight here and i think this is what makes this novel perhaps for for gender scholars is the importance of looking at international hierarchies in the constitution of gender in practice okay so in what ways do kind of hierarchies between states right how does that matter for how gender is performed by diplomats okay because it's not the same thing right to be a female ambassador representing the u.s. as it is to be a female ambassador representing St Kitt's and Nevis okay you do feminities in a different way your gender performance is going to look different right because of these internationalized hierarchies so that's what i'm like the nexus kind of between international hierarchy and gender that's my primary one with the other hierarchies entering in okay so the rest of the talk now i'm sorry to start with a drier kind of more abstract theoretical baggage but just to give you a sense of how we're entering into the project i will now try to turn to some of the findings and some of the more concrete stuff like what kinds of patterns do we see then and i will primarily because we have we have you know done these in order so we start with the theoretically less interesting but no less important number one right where are the men and women in diplomacy we need to know this how many ambassadors are women in the world right so we've done some work on that also done some work on language symbols and images i'll talk primarily about those two and then i'll give you some hints of where we are with the interactions and the identities but that's that's work that we're still doing so i don't have findings there yet to share with you um so on turning to the hierarchical divisions of labor within diplomacy when we talk about diplomacy or talk about divisions of labor right we have done this simple theoretically not so interesting right but still necessary and very time consuming i might say mapping of where men and women are placed in terms of the formal positions of diplomacy one part of this again concerns where men men and women are at within individual ministries of foreign affairs so there's one person in the project that does work on the Swedish ministry for foreign affairs to look at what's happened it's lots of women have come in right she's seeing that there's also very gendered patterns within the organization right that women tend to cluster kind of the more humanitarian offices foreign aid and so forth men tend to cluster and securities and political affairs right so not surprising but you see it and from what it might seem it might seem also that the more women there are initially the bigger the gender patterns are right those might disappear over time but not yet but then you know we do collaborations with with scholars around the world they're working on again like Indonesia, Japan, India, Brazil, Turkey right the US so those are scholars in the network and not in the core they're looking at this then these are primarily public administration types of folks right so that's one piece of the divisional labor the other piece that i'm very interested in and that we've done some work on is patterns and postings and to get to those i mean the data that's available or that we can at least assemble has to do with ambassador postings so how many women ambassadors are there and where do they get posted what states post women ambassadors and where do they get posted to so we put together a database on the postings of 2014 where all the ambassadors that were it wasn't necessarily the year they were posted but that were in a post in 2014 just soon to be complete i think it's roughly somewhere between 9,000 and 10,000 people so it's a lot of work and we you have to go through each ministry for foreign affairs there's no ready database you have to go through each individual ambassador and see if that person is you get either Mr or Ms right you're either her excellence or Excellency or his excellence so there's a binary set up and we have to go through each and every one to see so we now with lots of research assistance almost done with 2014 we're now beginning with 2019 but we do have some data so we can't say something about the numbers and remember ambassadors an ambassador is kind of the apex of the diplomatic career so this is the top posting which means that there are a lot more women at the lower levels okay so this is at the top level so in 2014 then there were 15 percent women ambassadors have written female investors which is kind of incorrect women ambassadors i should say they were designated women ambassadors by sending state so 85 percent of ambassadors still are men right so at the top level it's not as if there's been a huge breakthrough yet but the ratio of women ambassadors varies quite a bit as you can see here right i don't think it's a huge surprise Nordic countries 35 percent right but i think you should also note that if we look to Europe if we exclude the Nordic states right Europe is slightly less than average and Europe does worse right than Africa and South America so it's not as if Europe has tons more women diplomats than other states of other regions of the world and we see quite a bit of variations within each region as well right so Colombia has more than 30 percent women ambassadors Philippines has more than 30 percent they have as many as Denmark right so there's also variation within them so you know this is just rough just to give a rough sense the question of why the variation still remains to be answered but that's what all these folks they're looking at individual ministries for foreign affairs that's what they're doing and the next question we can look at is where are they sent right if you note North America which is Canada US and Mexico's 29 they send 29 percent women ambassadors but they receive only 16 percent on average and the United States if we look at the US receives 6 percent even though the US sends more than 30 percent right so we see that this isn't quite it doesn't look exactly the same it's not entirely reciprocal so then we can start asking questions why might that be hmm what's so special about the US right well it's a hub of international power right and when we look at if we you know what we did is we ranked states according to military expenditure and according to the size of economy and a bunch of other indicators to look at like what are the kind of the hubs of power in the world right and how can we rank states we see that you know in the bottom half there's no real difference it's not as if women end up in the poorest least powerful states right but when we look at the very top the DC London Paris Berlin Moscow there are very few women there right so it's something akin to a glass ceiling so I'm blowing bubbles now to drink so we're seeing that at the very center of international power and prestige there are not very many women diplomats or women ambassadors okay which means then that that helps reproduce this idea right the international the central power international politics is still right man it's held by men right and in that sense masculized in the sense that it still becomes associated with men right and whether you get posted to dc or not of course has most to do with what's going on in your home ministry for foreign affairs that's power battles that like women and men are fighting duking out right in their home ministries but they clearly look similar across the world since there are very few states that consistently send women ambassadors to to dc and interestingly out of the states when I was in dc last year to do fieldwork many of the women that were there was about six percent or seven percent women ambassadors and many of the women that were there represented a very small island like the caribbean states right 30 percent of the women that were there representing muslim majority states okay so it's not either as if it's again like european states sending their ambassadors to the us right so I there's a lot here I think to unpack and to look more closely at it and I think the main takeaway if we're interested in international hierarchies is this is another way in international politics that power is masculized right that the centers of power are still dominated by men okay so lots of questions then we're just beginning to scratch the surface loss of questions can be asked about the formal positions of power right we have ma students again asking a range of other questions are women less likely to be posted to militarized contexts among donor states is there a division of labor so to speak between men and women with women more likely to end up in foreign aid positions right do women ambassadors ever serve a symbolic function posted to signal that the sending state is so called progressive or modern right they're all kinds of questions to be asked about about like why these few women they're being posted why are they being posted where they're posted right but then so there's a set of questions then about the formal positions of diplomacy this is not I think for my this is not what I find most animating I think we need this we need this data we need to see this black and white we need to know these basics right but theoretically it's not the most kind of stimulating work it's not where my heart is really either so I think then like I find more interesting is kind of when we get into you know how gender is performed done represented right that's where you find much more interesting stuff to look at so the second way then to approach this if we use Joe Knacker's way of cutting into institutions is to look at whether and how diplomacy and the figure of the diplomat are gendered rhetorically in language okay so we can ask that question like how is diplomacy gendered symbolically and in language see how much time I have here okay um and the two most important texts addressing this question today there's a chapter by Cynthia and Lowe that you might be aware of her right she wrote this iconic book from 1990 banana speeches and bases and then there's a chapter by Eva Newman he was a professor at LSE right that in his book at home with the diplomats so he has a chapter where he addresses kind of masculinity's feminities and diplomacy and both of them agree that diplomacy is masculinized and that the diplomat is figuratively if not always literally a man right so in those chapter remains the classic academic treatment of this question and she writes about the late 1980s that she she presents diplomacy as a very male world guided by norms of masculinity inhabited by men and she writes quote that men are seen as having the skills and resources that the government needs if its international status is to be enhanced they are presumed to be the diplomats end of quote and then she writes a lot about how women then are channeled into these informal roles as wives and kind of support workers that don't get recognized in diplomacy Newman comes to a similar conclusion but he does something else in his work he distinguishes between three different masculinities that work in diplomacy that he calls the bourgeois petty bourgeois petit bourgeois and rebel masculinities but he's very clear also that the diplomat is scripted male right which leads to quote an inherent tension between the status is women and diplomat end of quote so when I started this program in this project I had this idea about the masculinisation of diplomacy as a premise so when the Valenberg foundation when they wrote a cover piece like they wrote an article about my project the title of that article is women diplomats clash against masculinity norms I assume that this was the case but then I started reading more because I'm not a diplomacy scholar right so I started reading more widely about diplomacy and particularly in US media circles right US foreign policy circles and how they represent diplomacy and I became much less sure that diplomacy is so securely masculinized even if it's still dominated by men okay so let me give you an illustration one of the first instances that gave me pause that made me think that there's something else going on here and that's the debate which you might have seen it's a decade old now but between Robert Cagan and Perrigana on the strategic cultures of the US and Europe after the Cold War 2002 Robert Cagan published an essay called power and weakness which you might have read which sparked a great deal of debate on both sides of the Atlantic the essay as you know might know set out to contrast the post Cold War strategy cultures of the US and Europe and to claim that their distinctive strategic dispositions derive from the relative power positions so Europe is weak and the United States is strong so Europe is forced to use in his words use international law and diplomacy whereas the US can rely on military force right so it's a familiar kind of depiction of what the US and Europe is strategically in international affairs to make this point Cagan drew on some familiar gender metaphors so equating Europe with a woman and the US with a man right so in an infamous passage he claimed that that on major strategic and international questions today Americans are from mars and Europeans from venus and a quote so to Cagan then Europe's reliance on diplomacy is indicative of the femininity of Europe so by favoring negotiation persuasion and diplomacy Cagan suggested that Europe should metaphorically be conceived of as a woman because this is what women do right the essay of course started up a lot of debate so pair conna it was then a US fellow of the new america foundation he is an LSE phd and a prolific policy analyst he objected very strongly to the portrayal of diplomatic Europe as a woman right so conna suggests another metaphor for Europe in a 2004 foreign policy article that was entitled Europe right the metrosexual superpower so conna contends that Europe's way of being in the world better represents modern manhood than does the old fashioned US reliance on force so in fact all the Europe engages in feminine behaviors and displays feminine characteristics this does not warrant equating Europe with a woman and i'm going to read from from conna's article or he writes quote the trend setting male icons of the 21st century must combine the coercive strengths of mars in the seductive vials of venus put simply metrosexual men are muscular but suave confident yet image conscious assertive yet clearly in touch with their feminine sides by cleverly deploying both its hard power and its sensitive side the european union has become more effective and more attractive than the united states on the catwalk of diplomatic clout meet the real new europe the world's first metrosexual superpower which is nice because we don't really have to analyze much here and there's no subtext right it's all written out so anyways conna ends his essay by stating that quote europe has revealed its true 21st century orientation just as metrosexuals are redefining masculinity europe is redefining old notions of power and influence and his point is very clear right that europe is better conceived as a metrosexual male than a woman right so in the question for us is what are we to make of this right i mean we could dismiss this as just kind of tongue-in-cheek banter that's not representative of how diplomacy is understood and discussed more widely but i argue that this exchange is but one instance right of a more widespread practice in the us of discourse feminizing diplomacy so i use the concept of feminization here simply to me representing a person institutional object that's having so-called feminine or allegedly feminine traits right skills or practices so to be clear i'm not arguing that diplomacy is not also infused the scripts of masculinity it is right there's plenty of evidence of that but what i claim here is instead that mass the masculine standing of diplomacy and the diplomat is unstable and it's susceptible to feminization right so the diplomat so to speak is a gendered subject thus alternates right so we see it slipping sliding changing form between right a woman and a feet man a lesser man right and back and forth which is surprising of sense right given the male kind of dominance of diplomacy as an institution so diplomacy may be particularly prone to feminization in periods and contexts of militarism in the us right such as right now when so many seem so enthralled with military power and there's a sidelining of the state department and the use of of diplomacy so that feminization is seen as something that i mean the feminine is something negative and you use feminization to degrade a practice that you don't agree with right but my sense is none the less that the feminization of diplomacy in the us gains much force right from discourses that are in wider international circulation so i think there's a transnational subtext here on diplomacy which is highly gendered right i don't think this is limited to the united states even though it might be played out differently in the uk or in sweden or elsewhere right but the discursive material that makes possible the identification of diplomacy as female effeminate or not quite male probably extends beyond the us borders in short so what then is that makes diplomacy susceptible to feminization and in what ways has it been feminized in us discourse well i think there are at least four interrelated factors right same much time we have i'll be very quick here one of them is pretty obvious right the diplomacy is often presented as the alternative to military force right that there are all these dualisms right that there's war there's diplomacy right there's war and peace there's hard power there's soft power and they're very easily aligned themselves with gender binaries right that women become associated with soft power men with hard power and so forth right so it's easy to make these things align and we see this quite often so i'm not going to linger on this too long because i think this is a pretty obvious point then we can see a lot of this going on in foreign policy discussions right of talking about diplomacy in this sense as you know one trump administrator said that is calling it like lace panty diplomacy or right sissy diplomacy and all these sorts of right like adjectives worse to kind of demean by feminizing diplomacy right and again like talking about like sidelining the state department as you know right in this return to the hard power in the muscular foreign policy of of the contemporary us but then there are other pieces i think of diplomacy that serves the same end right and that is for instance that diplomacy the essence of diplomacy is negotiation right so communication negotiation using relations for information gathering is absolutely central to what diplomats do right and in many places right conversations and the use of language are widely understood and represented in gendered terms right so there are all kinds of ideas about how men use language and how women use language that women supposedly are better about establishing connections negotiating relationships they're more empathetic they're right more interactive and so forth they're also represented as more talkative and more gossipy right and gossip is very important to good diplomats you need to have your ear on the gossip right so as i was trying to google an image of gossip it's very hard to find an image that is of men gossiping if you look at google images it's all women whispering right so there's gossip itself is a gendered i mean we understand it in gendered terms right so we even see this you know i mean or not surprising i think there are those to draw connections then between the nature of diplomatic work and the allegedly superior conversation skills of women right so when we see in the WikiLeaks the dump of cables coming out of WikiLeaks there was a lot of disparaging like when people were reading like what diplomats the cables that they were sending so a lot of disparaging commentaries this is all they do right it's a bunch of a bunch of women gossiping that kind of language right talking about what it is that diplomats do but also see here that some of the women that are in diplomacy take this to make an argument for why they're actually better diplomats than their male colleagues so we don't it's not just a way of disparaging it can also be used by women right strategic to argue that they're in fact better positioned as diplomats so last year when I was doing interviews in DC for instance I talked to Barbara Bodine is a former US ambassador and she expressed these ideas very very clearly so I'm just going to read a quote from her when she explains why this is what diplomacy is and in her terms women then are better at this than men are so she says okay so diplomacy is the art of building relationships to deal with issues that you don't even know you're going to have there's a lot of time spent talking with people not necessarily on what the issue is it's not always transactional women I think we're more comfortable with non-linear conversations we're more comfortable in trying to get to know the person that we're dealing with tell me about your wife your kids the dog kind of conversation we tend to deal more holistically with the people that we work with and we're more comfortable with that and to a certain extent we're more empathetic or we're more comfortable being empathetic and so a lot of these skills that we have translate almost perfectly into diplomacy she says and then you add to that that we're a smart if not smarter than our male colleagues so my point of view and then she laughs that she says this always was I have every advantage that you have I'm just as smart as you are I'm just as educated as you are I can write as well as you can I can come up with policy so I've got all the intellectual skills that you've got plus I have personal skills that you really don't or you don't have them as naturally as I do end of quote so we see this reproduced among the diplomats themselves right as a way of here the feminine is not denigrated rather but rather appellate it's like this actually makes us women better some some women diplomats argue right third because I think I'm running out of time diplomacy is essentially in essence also about representations teas dinners events right food also closely often associated with so-called women's work right none of this again I'm not essentializing these binaries right but rather like we can see that overlaps right and finally in the US not least diplomacy is feminized and I kind of lump these together this is kind of fancy French and foreign thing that's antithetical to what a real American man is right this is not Texas stake right this is something this institution is something else and right diplomacy obviously does have a French foundation there are a lot of French terms used right there are French practices and that's part of modern diplomacy right it remains an elite institution white male and Yale they often talk about right for the US like the people that end up in diplomacy right so you have it's pretty wealthy ambassadors right with the French foundation and the fact that it's very culturally upper class still right so all this means then right that it just opens itself up again to this kind of class based feminization and denigration of diplomacy right in the US French itself is often represented in gender terms with French depicted as a female language there's a lot of scholarship on this already right you might have fallen John Kerry when he was running for president like that was actually a disadvantage for him that he could speak French right because it made him seem less manly right so there's also worked on on this um and this has been the case for a long time in the US so George Kennan you might know he's a foreign policy strategist in the US spelled this out quite clearly he was lamenting the fact that the US there's so many people that look down on the plumage he says in his words right like quote many Americans find this occupation unmanly he says right and then he talks about the stuff the speaking of French and the right the elite institutions and the attention to dress and so forth and then if we go back to the question to this image this is the image that was used in foreign policy to depict the metrosexual superpower right the diplomat I mean look at that diplomat right I mean here we have someone right that appears as some sort of European thought right impeccably dressed in a fitted suit he has an accentuated waist pretty feminine curves in a sense slick back blonde hair right turned up nose this general posture is very much one of arrogance elitism right this is pretty far from the empathetic caring relational diplomat that we're talking about before this diplomat radiates elitism and glamour right elisting both envy and scorn among those representing so on some then I think when we're looking at like how diplomacy is is represented in language right it is masculinized but not stably so right there are all kinds of ways in which feminization figures into the the like what the diplomat is made to be and what diplomacy is made to be right and we need to ask questions about the diplomat kind of as a moving subject in gender terms I think we're running out of time so I'm just going to say a few things then about the gender networks so the next piece of this project has to do with the networks the interactions and the practices and what those look like generally networks they're central to what diplomats do right you establish networks and those networks are often permeated by international hierarchies it's very hard for kind of weak or powerless states to be part of established networks with the core kind of wealthy powerful states of the world okay and there are all kinds of coalitions between so-called like-minded states the Caribbean states tend to meet together the Nordic states have their meetings and so forth right so these are kind of the geopolitical realities of international affairs shaping what diplomatic interactions look like and here I think it's very interesting to note that there are lots of sites DC has it Vienna Oslo the Vatican Lisbon lots of places there are women network there's women diplomats networks so official networks consisting of women ambassadors or women diplomats more widely where they meet regularly they share information they help each other strategize and that cuts across all these international hierarchies right so what I'm doing now is trying to figure out more in terms of what are these what are they responding to what is it that gives rise to the idea that you should have a network of women ambassadors or a network of women diplomats more broadly right and what is it that they do right because this is something that's not well accounted for in the scholarship of international relations or the scholarship of diplomacy so that's a very interesting kind of set of interactions um and it suggests that gender matters right because the women are obviously responding to something and they're always doing something and then the final piece also has then the fourth part of what acker was talking about is identities how they're at work which has to do here what I'm looking at is the management of feminities and masculinities by diplomats so this entails drilling into the performance of gender through the use of clothes shoes bags jewellery hairdo so forth might seem trivial but it takes a lot of work right it takes work if they're really strict professional norms that your hair has to look a certain way it takes work to right to to dress to hide your curves or show your curves in a particular way or to discipline your body to have to meet certain slimness fitness kind of criteria there among ambassadors clearly right it takes work to sit on a stage in a skirt and make sure that the journalists don't get like a photograph up your up your skirt right and of your underwear is one ambassador and explain to me there's a lot of tiny little things here that go into performing right as a male or female diplomat and then there's the question how men and women maneuver right strategize around these things um there are ways in which some ambassador talk about that that they use this to their advantage right there might be expectations for instance that women don't quite understand as much or know as much which several ambassadors have told me they use strategically all the time when they interact with male counterparts pretending to be stupid putting their head on the asking dumb questions that way you elicit a lot more information than that person that your counterpart should have given you right so there are ways in which you can use strategize and maneuver through this which is part of what we're looking at in this piece of the of the of the project um also there are ways in which you can use clothes to be seen i'm sure you've read somewhere at least heard of Madeline all by using her pins to signal things but there's also that you know using dress right most diplomats are men most of them wear suits it's hard to stand out right whereas if you're wearing a bright red dress you're very visible right and for us ambassador for instance where everybody at an event needs to know that the us ambassador was there you have to make a showing it's very important if you're very visible right you come in people see you and you can go out the back door 10 minutes later and everyone knew you were there right so there are ways in which again it might seem trivial but i think if we drill into this and see all the labor it takes and add it with the other stuff right it is part of this institution here i will end just to say again i think piecing all these things together asking questions about all this stuff simultaneously is what we need to understand how gender works in diplomacy thank you very much response and then we'll open it up for i'm not sure if there's anybody in here at seven if there isn't we can run on a little bit if there isn't we'll have to continue the discussion over it awesome okay i'll make it speedy so we can get to the wine quickly so before i kind of dive into my commentary on what an was talking about very excellently might i add i just kind of want to frame my perspective on where i'm coming from i'm the co-founder and uk director of the center for feminist foreign policy i founded it a little over two years ago when i was fresh out of my masters from so has um so i um a really big nerd about feminist foreign policy this is a thing i get most excited about um and i think just kind of really quickly to define it and just share my understanding of it and kind of then how like gender and diplomacy falls under this this umbrella um so the best way i've really found to describe it is as like people centered policy because ultimately that's really what it boils down to is um making sure that people affected by policy are included in the policy making process and then making sure that policy outputs um are centered around what their potential impact will be on people so i think in general like i are as we all probably know is very very abstracted it's just got a lot of realist thinking in it so um there is this tendency to kind of lose track of the human consequence of foreign policy a lot of the time um and and make this connection between the local and the global um and you know i think too that like gender equality is a really big part of feminist foreign policy but it's sort of one part of it and there really needs to be a very intersectional understanding of what feminism is to have a true feminist foreign policy um and to really kind of actively undo this this systemic racism you know in the uk obviously we see this so strongly with um colonial legacies um so let's see i'll skip through this to get to the end um so so we've got a couple different projects with the center for feminist foreign policy to kind of help ground this really big picture kind of overarching ideology into um practice into something a little bit more tangible so for us kind of the things that we're looking at specifically in the uk right now um involve um eliminating nuclear weapons ending indefinite detention of immigrants and then also involving more women in political leadership so this fits very nicely with what an was talking about um i think it's not really possible to produce effective foreign policy if it's only coming from a really specific very elite pool of people who are reproducing their own thought patterns um and aren't allowing kind of any new or different perspectives into what they're doing um so in this sense it is just incredibly important just on that basis alone to to try and have um more diverse representation of the population mirrored in political leadership um and you know foreign policy and diplomacy it is this very kind of external role where you go and you um represent your state's needs and interests to other people so to and it's not a democratic process either um so to have again like a very specific group of people representing this and making kind of judgments based off of their own lived experiences just does a real disservice actually to kind of crafting state to state relationships um so yeah i think you know this this kind of nepotism again just keeps um this particular group think um and if i'm american if you can tell by my accent and i've lived in the uk for about four years now and i feel like this is a really big part of the reason why we keep seeing um just this this really realist way of thinking these really um kind of nefarious toxic hegemonic masculine principles in foreign policy making um and you know i think it's it's really important to note as ann has has pointed out rightfully so that there is a really big danger in looking at foreign policy from this like male versus female binary that said i do you think it's also completely okay to like have a conversation around including more women in in diplomacy and foreign policy and making the space for that conversation but obviously not at the expense of other conversations as well um but then this is also why speaking about kind of gender traits and the expectations of how kind of gender is performed and the different ways that gender influences how we understand foreign policy is and power more generally is is really really critical um so my my own personal area of research is is around um masculinity and nuclear policy and you know this is an area that that really strongly relies on diplomacy and is also just incredibly male dominated um the male pale stale Yale phrase um so within nuclear policy i've looked at kind of how these um gendered characteristics are ascribed to specific gender identities and these traits are then used to inform um the way we are expected to behave based on our own gender identity of course um which informs life experiences and decision making and if you're in a position where you're making policy that has a direct impact on what you have as an output how you make policy and how it affects other people so you know and i think we're at so as we can all agree that just because you have a certain gender identity doesn't mean you're going to have these specific gender traits we all know this is this is completely a construct and is in desperate need of of interruption um and this is why you know i get annoyed when people start talking about how and i've definitely heard this too with my work where men are just better at dealing with hard security you know it's just throughout history um we have formulated this perception that hard security needs these more masculine traits to be successful whatever successful means you know preventing war or keeping peace um at the on the basis of the threat of violence by the way um so so i think this is where Ann's work has has really been just like amazing and and really groundbreaking in a lot of ways because it just reminds us that this is a very manufactured pattern this is not objective fact um diplomacy is better when there are more people involved and i think one of the kind of phrases that has really stuck with me is this idea of power and prestige and and kind of what her work talks about is um you know saying that men tend to be over overrepresented in positions characterized by power and prestige which then influence societal perception of what power and prestige looks like so it's this very self-fulfilling kind of prophecy um and also reminds me of the phrase you can't be what you can't see so i think purely by including uh just simply including more women in diplomacy we already begin to interrupt this idea of like what power even looks like to begin with um so yeah i think you know understanding where um male and female diplomats are kind of looking at the pipeline to ambassadorships how that might be leaking is also really critical to understanding how um how women are meaningfully included in diplomacy so obviously you know we've got the the statistic of having 85 percent of ambassadorships be having been held by men um but we know at the same time there does tend to be i think it was close to a 50-50 ratio of men and women going into like the foreign policy or diplomacy fields here in the uk but somewhere along the way women fall out of that route to an ambassador ship and i think we really need to be hyper critical of why this is happening how it's happening and how we can can really address this um because there is just a very very clear glass ceiling here um and diplomacy is just a really core part of foreign policy um and in some ways does represent this other side to the coin of um the more traditional militarized approach to security which is really based on this threat of violence so looking at how gender comes into play with diplomacy um is just an absolute necessary thing to um to crack that glass ceiling and really truly start to make foreign policy a more feminist space um yeah all in there thank you thank you audience for your patience the floor is now yours gentlemen right at the back if i can issue the listening please to say who you are and make your question short and sharp okay thank you uh my name is ellie i'm affiliate of london minneville institute i'm i'm regular here more or less part of the furniture as they say uh thank you for speaking in plain english with hardly any jargon and you came across loud and clear uh my question is do you have any figure breakdown of uh representation of women ambassadors or diplomats from the block of 55 i believe at least 55 i stand to be corrected in figures 55 muslim states which includes 22 arab states out of again i think it's 196 member states of the un do you have any figure breakdown of that and thank you again thanks we'll take a couple of questions i think take one down the front anybody else in the wings and one in the middle after first of all thank you very much for your presentation my name is blankar i used to study uh ciz i must have seen energy on climate policy a couple of years ago and i was one of the um first members of this center for women's empowerment that we created in the ciz one of the things that we started doing in the in the center was trying to look at the different things that we consider were not wrong or had a gap between what we would like them to be on where they were in terms of uh lectures in terms of students of texts and we tried to tackle for example the amount of um readings that we were exposed to that were created by male and women we tried to do some research we tried to put some pressure internally as i'm pleased by remember um on trying to to adjust that also based on my personal experience i've seen how the undergraduate for international relations was our degree for for girls and then it was a career for men and there were there are many jobs like that that i could spot on so based on your experience as researchers what kind of things can be fixed or can change at the ground level of universities to make sure that people who have those masses and those programmes get to those positions of being ambassadors of countries thank you great that's a great couple take move us to take those two good uh good balance questions do you want to start out sure uh and i i hit this already that two really interesting questions i unfortunately don't have data on the on muslim muslim majority countries but that's data we could very easily put together and i think having your question now i think that i will go back and ask my group to do that so i think that that would be very interesting what i do know is that there is work in a number of muslim states right or islamic states to increase the number of women ambassadors like you know again um i think i think morocco i don't want to be wrong now but i think morocco has an active program to recruit more women into diplomacy uh united arab amres does right and again as i said before the you know 30 of the women ambassadors there in dc are from muslim majority countries so it's not as if right there's not momentum and movement right in that block of states i just i wish i had the data to to give you and i don't right now but i will go and and take a look um and then the second question was really interesting but so if i understand you right like what should be done at the university level to make sure that more women go into the diplomatic career and then end up ambassadors okay the that's a huge question i think um i don't i mean i think it depends on where you're located in the world obviously but i think in the uk or for instance i don't think there's a lack of applicants right so you have a lot of women that go into diplomacy so i don't think that's an issue in itself i think the question is rather and here i don't have the answers but i think the question is again like what does that pipeline look like is it a leaky career pipeline or is it a tight career pipeline because if it leaks women along the way they're not going to end up as ambassadors right and things that seem to affect this it's a range of stuff but what kind of provisions are there you know still women take more responsibility often for the family which is not you know that's not set in stone but sociologically that's what it looks like right so it seems that ministries of foreign affairs would they have better you know family provisions that kind of accommodate for you know children that sort of thing women tend to do better in those ministries of foreign affairs than those where there's absolutely nothing right so that's one thing for instance you also have to make sure that you have that you have a ministry of foreign affairs that has that follow up on things like salary disparities or what the mentorship programs look like what kind of networks you have that you know like what does career development look like within that ministry for foreign affairs and what things are central right and are those central things gendered in a way that disadvantages women are not right what that looks like in the uk i don't know exactly right but i would say that those are the most you know that you have to get a good grip on on the institution itself so it's not so much getting there anymore as it is what's going on inside and again it does unfortunately seem like the whole you know family leave that piece seems one big piece of the puzzle as long as women are primary parents yeah um i think i was loud uh totally agree with what you were saying i think they're you know the responsibility really is on is on governments to make sure that their um their pathways to ambassadorships are achievable for everybody that wants it um and that there are built in systems to help people um who who have families or children whatever um unfortunately the only things i can think of sort of like short term are much more like upon the individual rather than like an institutional thing but there are really fantastic resources um like uh women in foreign policy is a website where they do interviews with a bunch of women in foreign policy um so i think more and more so i do see this recognition of um a lot of my female colleagues to just really kind of um make sure that other younger women have as many open doors as possible so i am seeing a lot more resources in that regard just to like learn how to have a current foreign policy or diplomacy um and understand like what skill sets are needed uh but yeah like i agree i think the bottleneck is really the the government in that sense yeah okay let's take a few more there's a in the middle there that's it but just behind you in that there you go yep okay oh hello i'm am i gwych yn jion um currently studying political science in ucl uh i worked uh a little bit before the program as journalist uh as far as i know uh i think the statistics need to be updated so it's uh half a question half a confirmation i got a couple years ago actually uh 25 percent of diplomats that diplomats are in the world uh female i don't know it's a regional statistic or it's worldwide uh but in my country i'm from china in my country uk and new zillion ambassador in my country are actually female and a couple of uh um ambassador from latin american country is also female so um i think uh i think some of them have the connection with the country even before they took the position so my question could be is it possible that they they are selected as a ambassador in a certain country is the expertise based because it has a language advantage and had they had a connection with the country or society and also i know uh uk also has their female ambassadors in ukrain and in mongolia so uh both of them can speak multiple languages so could it be um correlated with their increased level of women involvement in the politics thanks for taking one there and sorry there is okay last question then we'll be done i'm afraid we're going to move okay i'll be very quick my name is laura i work in comms at the international growth center at lse in recent years we have seen a rise in digital diplomacy how do you think this will impact your ongoing research on areas and questions such as identities and relations thank you thank you both of them will happily chat at the reception afterwards which is upstairs okay so do i respond or do we wait i didn't understand it you have a minute a minute okay so very quickly um it might be that they're 25 female diplomats now i'm looking at ambassadors which is at the top level and i doubt that there are 25 ambassadors today but there might be and yes i do think language expertise might matter in some cases japan for instance their delegations to the un is 60 female even though that's their prime foreign policy arena and we which we think is a language selection okay leave it there okay my two sentences that i'm from the us i'm very cynical regional knowledge doesn't help you because it's a very nepotistic way of appointing ambassadors okay sorry thank you very much