The Foreign Service Journal, March 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2016 9 LETTER FROM THE EDITOR No More Old Boys’ Club BY SHAWN DORMAN A Shawn Dorman is the editor of The Foreign Service Journal. in hiring, pay and benefits have largely been wiped away (thank you, Alison Palmer, the Women’s Action Organiza- tion and other pioneers); and women are out leading teams, USAID missions and embassies around the world. Is the Foreign Service truly equal and representative of America? Not yet. Do problems for women persist? Absolutely. Are there still more men than women in top positions? Yes. This month we consider women in the Foreign Service with a look back, a look ahead and a few ideas for keeping a posi- tive trend going. In “Foreign Service Women Today: The Palmer Case and Beyond,” former FSO Andrea Strano takes a look at the legacy of the women who led the charge to advance the status of women, which gathered momentum during the 1970s. FSOs Thao Anh Tran and Kristin Stewart at Embassy Panama City sha re a model for using the Federal Women’s Program at post for career network- ing and mentoring. And former USAID Senior Foreign Service Officer Erin Soto shares “Ten Leadership Tips for Aspiring Women.” We take a jump into the past with stories of female diplomats during dif- ferent decades. Retired FSO Andrea Farsakh shares her experience as “A Pioneer in Saudi Arabia” in the 1970 s and 1980s. And we travel back to the 1940s and 1950s “On Assignment with Maxine Desilet,” whose letters home an d efficiency reports from Berlin, Caracas and Rangoon illustrate the times as no couple years ago I was invited to talk about women in diplo- macy with middle and high schoolers at an all-girls school in Manhattan during a special “women in the world”-themed day. The more I thought about what to say to these very young women—most of whom had never heard of the Foreign Service—the more I “leaned in” to the realization that the Foreign Service offers a pretty darn great career for women. Progress over the past 50 years has been dramatic. The early decades of the Foreign Service were very white and very male, with rare exceptions. Until 1972, women who did make it into the Service had to resign if they married. This left few women to climb the ranks. When I joined in 1993, my A-100 class of 44 included just 10 women. And yet I didn’t perceive gender bias, neither in training nor out at post. I felt that oppor- tunity and promotion were equally avail- able to me and to my male colleagues. In fact, I found that being a woman in the Foreign Service was particularly useful in putting people at ease, encouraging them to speak freely. Today’s gender mix in A-100 classes is much more balanced, as it is at the entry- level for the other foreign affairs agencies. State specialist entry classes do tend to have more men than women because Dip- lomatic Security and IT still attract more men than women. But gender biases second-hand narrative can. In “Challenging Tradition, ” we offer first-person accounts—based on oral history interviews conducted by the Association of Diplomatic Studies and Training—of three female Foreign Ser- vice officers breaking barriers from the 1950s through the 1980s: Elinor Consta- ble, Phyllis Oakley and Mary Olmsted. And in FS Heritage, Nicholas Willis traces the evolution of State personnel evaluations as reflected in the dossier of his aunt, Frances Elizabeth Willis—the third woman to join the Foreign Service (in 1927), the first career woman to be appointed ambassador (1953), and the first to attain the rank of Career Minister (1955) and then Career Ambassador (1962). We can’t publish this focus without a nod to the American Foreign Service Association of today. AFSA represents— and is the voice of—the Foreign Service. Throughout its 92-year history, AFSA’s membership, and leadership, has gener- ally looked like the Foreign Service. So it is worth noting that women have held the post of AFSA president during five of the last seven years. AFSA vice presidents for the two largest constituencies—State and USAID—are women: Angie Bryan and Sharon Wayne. Our current president, Ambassador Barbara Stephenson, represents the best of today’s FS leaders: she’s looking out for those behind her on the FS career path and recognizes the importance of striv- ing for a Foreign Service that looks like America. n