GenDip and IP seminar with Karen E. Smith

Abstract:

This paper summarises the findings from the LSE IDEAS Women in Diplomacy project. In a series of conversations with female leaders, the project has examined women’s leadership in international organizations and multilateral diplomacy, building on research that has examined women’s leadership predominantly in a national context. Although women now lead a number of international organizations and are playing leading roles in multilateral negotiations, women are still underrepresented in multilateral diplomacy. At the UN, there are significant barriers to women’s leadership (Bode 2020; Haack 2022), and a similar pattern holds elsewhere, as in the European Union (Müller and Tömmel 2022). The project aims to understand the obstacles to representation and how they can be overcome, and probes how women operate within the gendered context of international diplomacy and the policy changes they may make as leaders (building on Blackmon 2020). The paper analyses the lessons learned thus far through conversations with female leaders, including the strategies women have used to overcome structural barriers to their advancement, the role that mentorship has played in enabling their careers, and the extent to which they think that gender has affected their leadership style, goals, and achievements.