Women are present in international affairs in ever greater numbers. In recent memory, Australia, the US, and the UK have all had (sometimes multiple) female foreign ministers. Research shows a steady increase in female diplomats around the globe over the last fifty years. And international organisations have increasingly focussed on women’s rights, from UN Security Council Resolution 1325 to the establishment of UN Women. Yet at the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women in New York earlier this year, the US administration spearheaded efforts to push back on the use of the word “gender”, as well as attempts to ensure that the next Secretary General of the UN is a woman. We exist in a complicated time for women and gender issues in international politics, continuing to build on huge gains while facing a steady and forceful backlash.
Elise Stephenson’s The Face of the Nation: Gendered Institutions in International Affairs, is published at this key point flashpoint around women in global politics. It sits as a hugely important contribution to the developing literature on women in international affairs and diplomacy. Stephenson focusses on the case study of Australia. She considers women’s position across four agencies of the Australian government – the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Defence, the Department of Home Affairs, and the Australian Federal Police – showing through quantitative data the changes that these bodies have seen over recent decades. The book is impressively researched, makes key original contributions to the literature, and is accessible in its style, making it deserving of a wider readership beyond just the academy. Beyond the detailed consideration of the Australian case study, which is brought to life through an impressive overview which draws on in-person observation, dozens of interviews, and documentary analysis, the book’s conceptual contributions are three-fold and of keen interest to scholars working across feminist politics and international relations.
Firstly, The Face of the Nation plays an important role in bringing feminist institutional theory and feminist IR into conversation with one another. Whilst feminist political science has paid much attention to women within national political institutions and women’s leadership and career trajectories within them, it has paid less consideration to women in more international facing roles, such as diplomacy or Ministries of Foreign Affairs. Simultaneously, feminist IR has been reticent to consider institutions within international politics or institutional approaches as a method of study. As a result, the study of women diplomats, and women’s place within international agencies more broadly, has also, until recently, fallen between the cracks of the two sub-disciplines. Although this is changing (see the developing, and increasingly voluminous literatures on feminist foreign policy and women in diplomacy) institutional approaches within feminist IR still remain thin on the ground. Feminist institutionalism as a framework has yet to make major inroads into the feminist study of international politics. A central contribution by Stephenson is therefore in bringing these two worlds together – the success of which should make this book widely read across feminist politics and IR.
The book brings these schools of thought together and represents a key contribution to feminist institutional thinking. The first wave of FI work, in its explicit focus on gender, was less centred on difference within women as a grouping. Stephenson pushes FI work forwards by explicitly thinking about intersectionality, and how to build this into her methodological framework. As a result, some of the most fascinating finding of the book related to sexuality, and the ways in which women diplomats with female spouses may receive greater support than those with male spouses.
Finally, and relatedly, Stephenson contributes an empirical discussion of regression and stasis within institutions. FI (and feminist political science more broadly) has focused on good news stories – on progressive moments (like the instigation of gender quotas, for example) or key critical junctures ( such as the creation of new institutions that are more attentive to gender than existing bodies – work on devolved bodies in the UK, for example). This book instead examines a case study that is both paradoxical and negative from a gender equality perspective :why, despite the increase in women’s numbers within these bodies, have the conditions of the employment and promotion prospects not also improved? Stephenson adapts Georgina Waylen’s understanding of institutional layering to understand it as a negative, showing how, despite changes, regressive attitudes and working practices can be maintained that inhibit women’s progress.
Beyond these conceptual contributions, this book is a deeply detailed and nuanced discussion of an important case study that produces some fascinating findings. One of the most immediate is that militaristic institutions see better rates of female leadership compared to the more traditional diplomatic agencies. On the surface, this appears to fly in the face of strong trends in feminist IR work. She argues that this is the case by building a model which differentiates between types of masculinity. International affairs outside of the more militaristic areas suffer from a ‘genteel toxic masculinity’, which dominates as much as militarised masculinity, only more insidiously and thus more difficult to confront. Such a framing could be embellished upon further in other case study settings. She also illustrates how, as the number of women in Australian diplomacy has increased, traditional forms of diplomacy have become less important. She describes this as the ‘diplomatic glass cliff’, illustrating empirically the irony that women’s greater presence in this world is not necessarily translating into clearer power and influence.
Taken together, The Face of the Nation is a timely, conceptually important and highly accessible book that deserves to be read across feminist political science, IR and international sociology. Stephenson’s insights speak to key trends within the scholarly literature, but also the wider world of international affairs, as women grow within its ranks even as global misogyny reaches new heights.
This is a review of Elise Stephenson’s The Face of the Nation (Oxford University Press, 2024). ISBN: 9780197632727
Jennifer Thomson is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bath. Her main research interests are gender and foreign policy (particularly the concept of a ‘feminist’ foreign policy); gender and security; women’s rights in post-conflict divided societies; and sexual and reproductive health and rights in international policymaking.
