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Women and diplomacy

Ambassador Julia Chang Bloch It used to be that the only way a woman could truly make her foreign policy views felt was by marrying a diplomat and then pouring tea on an offending ambassador's lap," I will always remember Madeleine Albright saying this at an event in Washington shortly after President Bill Clinton's reelection when she was conducting an undeclared campaign to be named secretary of state. She went on to say, "In the U.N. Security Council, there is, thanks to President Clinton, one skirt to balance the fourteen suits. I like to think that is just about even odds." Today, in 2010, there are three women around the table in the U.N. Security Council Chamber. Susan Rice, the third woman to represent the US at the U.N. in the last fifteen years, is the only woman representing a permanent member of the Security Council. She is joined at the table for two years by Joy Ogwu of Nigeria and Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti of Brazil. How well are women doing in the diplomatic world today? In record numbers, women in the US are entering the rarified field of diplomacy, assuming leadership Roles, and breaking with centuries of tradition. As recently as the 1970's, women made up only 4.8 percent of U.S. foreign service officers, but in the last decade they have made rapid gains. The United states has had 184 women ambassadors since president harry truman appointed the first female ambassador in 1949. In 1989, when I was appointed Ambassador to the Kingdom of Nepal, women were 7 percent of US ambassadors. In 2008, there were 45 women representing the US out of about 167 ambassadors, or some 27 percent. However, major ambassadorial assignments are still almost exclusively given to men. Looking worldwide, today there are 28 women Ambassadors serving as their country's Permanent Representatives at the United Nations in New York . Seen against the background of 189 United Nations member countries, it means only fifteen percent of U.N. Ambassadors are women. While fifteen percent is not significant, the increase has actually been quite dramatic in the last few years, as not even six percent of UN Ambassadors were women in 2002. Back in Washington, female ambassadors are enjoying the so-called "hillary effect," which has come after three of the last four US Secretaries of State have been women, with Hilary Clinton the most well-known abroad. The "Hillary Effect" has led to 25 women ambassadors being sent to the US, the highest number ever, including ambassadors from Bahrain, Oman, India, and Colombia. Women ambassadors in Washington still make up only 14 percent of the total, but in the late 1990s there were only five woman ambassadors in Washington. One of those five was Singaporean Ambassador Chan Heng Chee, one of my old friends and the longest serving female envoy in Washington, who said that since she arrived in 1996, women in diplomacy has undergone a "quantum leap." Historically, diplomacy has been the preserve of men. Women were not admitted to diplomatic and consular services in any appreciable numbers until 1933, when 13 countries, including Nicaragua and Turkey, had women diplomats. Until the mid-twentieth century, the most extensive contribution made by women to diplomacy was as the wives of diplomatic and consular officers. In this capacity they supported their husbands by running diplomatic households, presiding as hostesses, making their own range of contacts to complement the official work of the embassy and in many instances, distinguishing themselves by local, voluntary, and community work. In the US State Department, there have been very few women or minority diplomats. The transition to a merit-based Foreign Service examination in 1924 theoretically opened up the Foreign Service, but many women and minority candidates were weeded out during the oral exams. The US Foreign Service did not gain a critical mass of women officers until the 1990's - 26 percent in 1993, 37 percent in 2007. Today, more than half of the new recruits for the US Foreign Service are women, according to the State Department. Until the 70's, women diplomats had to choose between marriage and career. Can you believe that the State Department expected women to give up their jobs if they married and did not remove this unfair requirement until 1974. To this day, women are generally posted to lesser posts, especially likely to be appointed as ambassadors to small countries in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. Blacks are nearly universally posted to traditionally "black posts", such as Liberia or Haiti. Hispanics are posted to the Spanish speaking world. And Asians were not visible in the field until 1989, when I became the first Asian American to achieve ambassadorial rank. American diplomatic service is relatively young - only 86 years old. Nevertheless, it took 25 years to have the first female US ambassador, when Eugenie Anderson went to Denmark in 1949 under the Truman administration. It took 65 years for America to have its first Asian American ambassador. And it took 72 years for women to attain the highest diplomatic position when Madeleine Albright became the first woman Secretary of State. Chairman Mao once famously said that women hold up half the sky. In 1945, when the U.N. Charter was signed in San Francisco, China was one of only four countries, out of fifty, who sent female delegates (Virginia Gildersleeve (US), Bertha Lutz (Brazil), Wu Yi-fang (China) and Minerva Bernardino (Dominican Republic). The other three were of US, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic. Wang Hairong, the grand niece of Mao Zedong, was the first woman appointed Vice Foreign Minister in China. Despite these early gains, however, of the eight hundred ambassadors that the People's Republic of China had appointed in its first sixty years, only 45, or 5.6 percent, were women. Today, nearly one-third of lower level diplomats are women, the highest-ranking being Fu Ying, who is currently a Vice Foreign Minister and was pre