State's Mid-Career Women Problem
So you want to talk about diplomacy, motherhood & Covid-19?
Sundays are for story time. May I share one with you?
Last September, I pitched the following:
The State Department is hemorrhaging women in its mid-career and senior ranks. This poses a sustained threat to the credibility and efficacy of America's mission abroad, and it's also frustratingly familiar to mid-career women all over the country. Neither the Trump administration nor the coronavirus created the struggles that working mothers face daily. But both have exacerbated them and made them more visible, and that’s certainly true for female diplomats. Whether Nov. 3 marks a complete diplomatic reset or a doubling down on an antiquated "pale, male, and Yale" status quo, American diplomacy has a women problem.
The reporting comes from a book I am writing. STATESWOMEN revisits the tensions and the triumphs of modern American diplomacy through the eyes of female diplomats. In countless conversations with current and former Foreign and Civil Service officers who have risen to the top ranks or who have made the difficult decision to depart the department at the height of their careers, two things are true: their ambition and talent matches their male colleagues’ and the challenges they face as women have often created an invisible barrier to success.
That’s why Foreign Service orientation course, dubbed the “A-100,” often has around a 50-50 gender split but the mid-to-senior ranks fall to 70-30 or below. Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, and, to a lesser extent, Samatha Power put public a face to women in diplomacy. But they were appointed by presidents who tapped them at the heights of their powers to assume crucial but also symbolic positions. Albright, Clinton, Rice and Power have all had the opportunity to tell their stories, which are extraordinary but not necessarily typical.
Typical is the former Foreign Service Officer recruited just out of school, who hit her first hurdle a decade later just as her career was taking off. She became pregnant and learned there were approximately eight infant beds available at DiploTots, which is State’s onsite child care facility. At the time, there were around 25 total infant beds for roughly 45,000 eligible employees in the Washington area.
Typical is the Civil Service Officer, who was passed over for awards after her supervisor didn’t approve of her adding unused vacation hours to the three months she took off as part of her maternity leave. These awards are key in determining who gets promoted. She did eventually make it into leadership but was dismayed that some of the women who she tried to bring up behind her would demure on more high-profile assignments to stay nearby for teenagers in high school or to care for aging parents.
In a family with two young children where both parents are in the Foreign Service, meanwhile, it still falls on the woman to battle with the Embassy to get their nanny’s visa expedited because it never occurs to her bosses that she might not be able to show up for work until she has childcare. As COVID cases spiked last spring, the State Department sent many non-essential personnel back to the United States. This couple decided to wait out the pandemic in spare rooms in her childhood home. The woman thought having grandparents in the same house would take care of their child care concerns, but it turns out there’s no substitution for mom, even when she tries to make international work calls from the hall closet, the garage or behind the neighbors’ fence.
The truth is the pandemic was just a more unexpected, pronounced and prolonged version of the micro-level burdens this FSO and many like her confront as mothers with big careers that they love. In the past, there was widespread reticence on the part of many female diplomats to bring attention to the part of their identity that had for so long been viewed as disadvantageous.
Those conversations were saved for private message boards and Facebook groups. But the pandemic’s toll and the toxic masculinity prized in the White House and Foggy Bottom has made more women ready to come forward and demand institutional change. They know first-hand the cost for the pervasive scarcity in representation among those who are the face of America abroad.
This is a feature ripe for this moment and the turnaround would be exceptionally quick. The personal stories would anchor the piece. But I would include other reporting gathered in researching the book, as well as reach out to others for the most timely context. Still, these women's stories would be the draw.
The pitch didn’t make the cut. That happens sometimes (and for a myriad of reasons). But now there is a new administration, that re-set we have heard about is in progress, women have been appointed to top and mission-critical positions at State, USAID & NSC, and there are important discussions under way about addressing the long-standing mid-career crisis. Beyond that, the pandemic continues, and in follow-up conversations for this newsletter, I’ve heard about some of the “positive” (within context) byproducts of spending more time at home with family. On Monday, in Part II of our conversation, Jenna Ben-Yehuda will share her own experience that — like so many others — defies simple classification.
So let’s keep talking — about work and success, ambition and new opportunities, motherhood, the pandemic, all of it. The politics and policy can rarely be divorced from the personal, at least not in a way that’s ever really beneficial to women. Share your own experiences in the comments on this post or email me directly at jennifer.koons@protonmail.com. I’d love to hear from you.
Want to Catch Up On Past Conversations?
Know a Woman in Foreign Policy Who Should Join our Conversation?
Share in the comments below or email me at jennifer.koons@protonmail.com.
Upcoming Conversations:
Former Ambassador Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley
Former Ambassador Dana Shell Smith
Foreign Service Officer and Rusk Fellow Heera Kamboj
Former Ambassador for Global Women's Issues Melanne Verveer
Retired senior Foreign Service Officer Virginia Bennett