ROLE OF WOMEN IN SHAPING FOREIGN POLICY

Before the end of the Cold War, only a few women had ever served as foreign ministers anywhere in the world. Since the early 1990s, however, women have frequently served in this capacity, though they are still a minority in foreign policymaking.

- Dr. Ambassador Tal Edgars

In September 2018, Canada and the European Union cochaired the first-ever meeting of female foreign ministers; eighteen of the almost thirty serving female foreign ministers attended, from countries spanning five continents (France24 2018).

The growing number of women in the upper echelons of foreign policy-making institutions raises an obvious question: will they make a difference to foreign policy decisions? AnneMarie Slaughter (2012) argued that more women in top foreign policy jobs 'would change the world far more than you think, from giving peace talks a better chance to making us better able to mobilize international coalitions to reordering what issues governments even choose to work on'. Francis Fukuyama (1998) claimed that 'a world run by women would follow different rules': it would be 'less aggressive, adventurous, competitive, and violent' (p. 27). Networks have burgeoned to encourage women to consider or remain in a career in foreign affairs.

Contemporaneously, Sweden and Canada have declared they will pursue a 'feminist foreign policy', and several states have pursued pro-women norms such as the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) on women, peace and security, and increasing women's participation in decision-making (Aggestam and Bergman-Rosamond 2016; Davies and True 2017; Hudson and Leidl 2015; Richey 2001). There is, however, very little academic literature on women in foreign policy-making and their impact on foreign policy-making including outcomes. Furthermore, there has been little use of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) approaches to try to investigate these questions.