City of Men: The Foreign Policy Community’s Women Retention Problem
Micah Zenko points out in a recent piece for Foreign Policy the glaring lack of women in Washington’s foreign policy community. Searching for numbers to support her assumptions, Zenko found less than 30 percent of policy and leadership positions held by women when she reviewed Washington’s ten most prominent think tanks.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies and Center for American Progress had the highest percentages of women in policy-related roles; the Stimson Center had the highest total percentage of women in all positions at 50 percent.
When Washingtonian magazine listed the salaries of ten think tank leaders, there was only one woman, Jessica Tuchman Mathews of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Zenko found the think tank gender trend to be relatively transferrable to academia, USAID and the Pentagon.
Anecdotally, Zenko found three reasons for the gender gap in the U.S. foreign policy community:
1) Women are generally less interested in writing about “hard power,” the dominant mode for discussing foreign policy.
2) Men in senior positions have an “unconscious cronyism” in hiring other men.
3) And, not dissimilar to explanations for the lack of women in corporate leadership, women cite difficulties juggling responsibilities at home with the demands of the job.
Suggesting that there is “unconscious cronyism” to explain the low number of women in these roles may not be a particularly satisfying answer to some and may be infuriating after observing some other data.
In the 1980s, approximately 80 percent of Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) were men. But since that decade, the numbers of women have significantly increased to the point that more women are starting off in the Foreign Service than men. In 2006, 215 women versus 172 men entered the basic A-100 courses held at the Foreign Service Institute–a trend that has held up for approximately the last decade.
What this suggests is that the foreign policy community has a retention and promotion-to-leadership problem.
Women are entering the field. Why is the community unable or unwilling to keep them?
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I would be interested to find out the answer to this question. Nice article and I like the pic of Hillary Clinton.
If the changing trend has only been over the last decade, it seems as though we need to give the problem some time to work itself out. The women that are entering the service in greater numbers can’t hardly be expected to rise into leadership positions so quickly. Based on your data, it seems that this problem may work itself out in another 10 years time.
I think it is the same as in any other profession, there are basically two reasons… 1) women take leave to have a family, and ; 2) women get fed up with the cronyism…it gets tiresome and is foreign to us…..it is very law schoolish or of the old-boy network, and quite frankly, women do not operate that way. If the woman is as qualified as the man, why should she not achieve the same level as a man sipping scotch in the locker room?
As for the #1, perhaps the woman stays out of the work force with family….OR, perhaps the private sector offers flexible work opportunities, making it easier for her to balance both.
As for #2, I think the old cronyism is starting to break-up….in part because today’s wives do not tolerate such barbaric behavior in their husbands, thus a generation of men more accepting of women in the work place is in play. Additionally, in the last decade, society has pushed for diversity in representative groups, boards and executives