Blog Post | Gendered, racialised, and classed diplomatic selves: Why Ministries of Foreign Affairs are slow to change
Ministries of Foreign Affairs (MFAs) have increasingly addressed gender equality and diversity, often through measures that are to level the playing field for marginalised groups. Despite decades of reform, MFAs are slow to change. One reason for institutional inertia is diplomats’ gendered, racialised, and classed sense of self.
Why MFAs are slow to change
Take Germany, for example. The German Federal Foreign Office (FFO) issued its first gender equality plan, then called the Women’s Advancement Plan, in 1995. In 2021, gender equality and diversity became a priority for the FFO, and again under the German feminist foreign policy. Still, despite recent gains, women, BIPoC, queer folks, and disabled people remain significantly underrepresented across the diplomatic service and its leadership roles, as they tend to populate the FFO’s less senior ranks, administrative services, and its locally employed staff. Additionally, the FFO’s institutional culture continues to be shaped by gendered, racialised, and classed inequalities, notwithstanding sustained attempts to address these through staff initiatives and policy strategies. The FFO is no exception; despite significant reforms over the last few decades, MFAs often remain ‘heavily male dominated […], heteronormative and elite’.
Why is that so? One explanation is that MFAs are characterised by institutional inertia. What diplomats do is often about routines and consensus, which produces stability. Leaky pipelines, biased recruitment systems, and the historical exclusion of women, queer people, and BIPoC have only added to that. Overall, diplomacy is a gendered, racialised, and classed institution that often produces unequal divisions of labour and hierarchies – and these inequalities are so deeply embedded that they cannot be overthrown quickly.
Diplomatic subjectivities and institutional inertia
Take diplomats’ own sense of self. In my ethnographic study of the German FFO, I demonstrate that diplomats actively shape their subjectivity through gendered, racialised, and classed practices. Consequently, a diplomat is largely imagined as a white man in a heterosexual relationship with a female spouse, and as belonging to ‘the elite’. This obviously clashes with some diplomats’ lived experiences if they cannot embody (parts of) these subjectivities.
A few examples:
At the embassy entrance, security regularly stop a female diplomat of colour. because she is ‘not on the list for employees’. However, they consult the wrong list: the one for locally employed staff, not the one for diplomatic envoys. A locally employed colleague is also stopped at the entrance because they are supposedly not on the list. They are German, too, but ‘blonde, pale, blue-eyed’. For them, security consult the list for envoys. Whiteness is here deeply entangled with who can represent the nation-state, and who is seen to really belong.
A diplomat introduces me to senior staff, explaining that I’m a scholarship holder of the German Academic Scholarship Association ‘just like you and I were’. The reference to the association – an institution that provides financial and academic support for the future German elite and that admits less than one percent of German students – underlines that diplomats may share a similar primary socialisation. They are constituted as ‘elite’ even before they join the FFO. However, gender, race, and class limit who can succeed in the German education system, fulfil the association’s admission criteria, and become ‘elite’.
A female diplomat reflects on colleagues’ reactions to her trailing male spouse: ‘Being a woman in a heterosexual relationship is like being a unicorn. I get things like, ‘How wonderful he helped with the move!’ Yes, of course, he also did the move, what’s with the question!’ Heteronormative and patriarchal expectations such as the male breadwinner and trailing wife are still deeply embedded in the FFO.
These examples highlight that diplomats produce their sense of self in mundane interactions steeped in gendered, racialised, and classed hierarchies. The result is a relatively stable subjectivity: the white, male, elite diplomat. This contributes to institutional inertia and stabilises the status quo. While my analysis draws on the German case, similar dynamics have been documented in other diplomatic institutions in the global minority world, including in the European Parliament, the UK House of Commons, and the Norwegian MFA
Why does it matter?
From a liberal perspective, this matters because MFAs might actively exclude the staff they want to attract through diversity measures. For instance, recruitment often ‘tests’ for similarity to existing diplomatic subjectivities. After all, when the general knowledge test asks you to ‘Put the following Puccini operas into a chronological order’, you might be better placed to do so if you had some sort of musical education as a child – and, relatedly, if you come from an academic, possibly white, middle-class family.
At a deeper, more structural level, these dynamics reveal how MFAs reproduce the gendered, racialised, and classed hierarchies on which their authority rests. Diplomatic subjectivities are historically tied to whiteness, masculinity, and elitism, and MFAs are shaped by these aspects more so than other administrative bodies. When diplomats – and MFAs – continue to privilege these subjectivities, they not only exclude certain groups but also uphold local and global inequalities. In the white institutional setting of the FFO, for instance, diversity is associated with race and attached to places and bodies elsewhere than Germany. This centres whiteness as the original state of the diplomatic service and the German nation it represents, rather than transform the racialised underpinnings of the FFO.
Towards feminist reflexivity
The inclusion of more ‘diverse’ bodies into MFAs does not automatically lead to change. While more diverse diplomats potentially bring more diverse perspectives to the table, my research indicates that their inclusion alone does not necessarily transform German diplomats’ underlying subjectivity. Even though marginalised groups disrupt the ideal of the white, male, elite diplomat through their presence or actions, they are unable to completely subvert it. After all, all diplomats – including marginalised groups – continually reproduce the structuring forces of gender, race, and class. This produces stability rather than change, and results in diverging experiences if diplomats cannot embody the dominant sense of self. The above examples attest to this.
To make diplomatic institutions more equal, we should therefore take care to address how gender, race, and class play out in the diplomatic everyday, including in diplomats’ deeply ingrained subject formation processes. Embedding feminist reflexivity – reflecting on one’s own position in global and local power relations – in MFAs might be but one small step forward.
Karoline Färber is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Erfurt, Germany. She is a scholar of diplomacy and foreign policy with a particular interest in feminist foreign policy; diplomacy and gender, race, and class; and knowledge production in foreign policy.