The face of Australia: Women in international affairs

Abstract

Australia’s foreign service is undergoing fundamental and rapid gendered change. Women form the majority of the Australian Public Service (APS) and a growing proportion of representation in international affairs agencies. Coinciding with an increasingly feminist and women-informed foreign policy across Australia, women verge on parity in diplomatic leadership for the first time in history. Yet, beyond high-profile appointments and shifting demographic profiles across agencies, gendered (and racialised, heteronormative, and classed) power structures continue to impact on whom is given the opportunity to represent Australia internationally. Women remain under-represented in senior leadership and international representation, and experience greater challenges in international affairs agencies than domestic government service. Therefore, this thesis uses a comparative case study approach to analyse women’s under-representation in four of Australia’s premier international affairs agencies: the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT); Defence (inclusive of the Department of Defence (DoD) and the Australian Defence Force (ADF)); the Department of Home Affairs (Home Affairs); and the Australian Federal Police (AFP). The research applies Feminist Institutionalist (FI) theory to explore institutional history and change, as well as analyse the demographics and experiences of women in executive level (EL) and senior executive service (SES) in order to answer the research question of why do women remain under-represented in Australian international affairs? Data is triangulated through a mixed methods research design, involving 57 in-depth qualitative interviews, observation in the field, and quantitative data analysis from the past 34 years. The research finds that gendered challenges pervade Australian international affairs. It is a field teeming with complex and multifaceted rules that challenge women at every turn, where gendered institutions endure through fluidity and adaptation. Gendered institutions have resulted in the under-representation of women in leadership and international representation. This is due to: (1) historical legacies that maintain male-domination and masculine supremacy in the field; (2) contemporary layering and duplication of regressive gendered institutions across individual, agency, diplomatic field, and society contexts; and (3) the compounding effect of challenges at different stages of women’s posting cycles, careers and lives. The thesis makes four core significant and original contributions. Firstly, it represents the largest and most comprehensive Australian study of gender in international affairs to date, and a significant contemporary global case study. Secondly, it develops a new FI framework for understanding gendered institutions in international affairs, applicable to researchers of gender and diplomacy and other international fields. Thirdly, it offers five original empirical findings, including that women were most proportionally represented in leadership and international representation in more militaristic agency structures, inverting conventional theory on militaries as the most male-dominated and patriarchal spheres of the state. Fourthly, this thesis contributes an FI mixed methods approach to understanding “hidden” informal institutions across contexts deeply layered, complex and cross-cultural. Overall, it is clear that as long as gendered challenges continue to impede women’s inclusion in international affairs, this damages states’ abilities to accurately determine and maintain state sovereignty, as well as represent and decide on matters of national interest. Leaders at this level act as the filter through which all international decisions are communicated, assessed, implemented, and evaluated. In essence, who leads, matters.