Bolstering the boys club

Research overview

Much of the research on gender and diplomacy to date has focused on those already let into the ‘club’ of international elites and details the impact of the exclusion of women in senior positions and the impact on diplomatic agendas. 

We wanted to go back a step and consider the “threshold” to diplomacy itself: security clearance processes. Security vetting ultimately determines who progresses, and what level of clearance (and therefore seniority or range of position) individuals can achieve in diplomacy. This has specific implications for women and minoritised groups, given that ‘[t]he higher an organisation’s security clearance is, the worse the gender balance’. 

This article seeks to trace the journey for individuals entering a diplomatic career. It argues that security vetting is simultaneously based on legitimate processes for assessing potential national security threats, and on values interpretation (such as loyalty, maturity and trustworthiness) which may invite bias or lead to illegitimate processes of exclusion. 

By uncovering the gendered history of vetting, we can better understand the limitations of the current de-historicised and ‘impartial’ process. 

We argue that clearance processes have not sufficiently evolved over the past decades of social progress, which has negative implications for the evolution of diplomacy as a social practice.