There is a real correlation between work/life balance, “foreign policy stuff” and the women’s perspective that is missing from foreign policy, according to Anne-Marie Slaughter
She writes for ForeignPolicy.com on why foreign policy is disadvantaged by being an all-boys club.
“Foreign policy is a very male world” she writes, “the women who have made it are a small and close club, all committed to advancing the careers of younger women and worried that even engaging in this conversation could make it harder to break those glass ceilings.”
“If more women could juggle work and family successfully enough to allow them to remain on high-powered foreign-policy career tracks, more women would be available for top foreign-policy jobs”.
According to Slaughter, the fact remains that foreign policy is predominantly a boys club, with the men “shaping America’s place in the world”.
As she surmises, there is one crucial perspective missing, and if more women were able to strike actual work-life balance they could access the capacity to stay on high-powered career tracks, and there would be much broader diversity and perspective that is necessary for such strategic processes.
This wider diversity “would change the world far more than you think, from giving peace talks a better chance to making us better able to mobilise international coalitions to reordering what issues governments even choose to work on” she writes.
The result, she says, matters “in ways that hinder the country’s ability to address the complex new challenges of our 21st-century planet. Countries would be better served if “both perspectives were equally represented in any decision-making process.”
Click here to read Anne-Marie Slaughter’s op-ed on Foreign Policy.com