Hardship Posts

One of the main ways in which the overall experience of men and women in the Mexican Foreign Service is different is their likelihood of ever being assigned to a hardship post. According to the internal rules of the Foreign Affairs Ministry, a hardship post is designed as such when it features at least one of the following criteria:

• Existence of armed conflict.
• Extreme lack of sanitary conditions.
• A rule of extreme intolerance or explicit discrimination.

When putting together the list of hardship posts, the Ministry's Human Resources Committee takes into account information provided by the Embassies around the world, the United Nations, and other international financial organizations.

Jose Arturo Trejo, Mexico's Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, a hardship post.

One important feature of these posts is that officers who have been assigned to them are awarded an extra point in their promotion exam total score. This benefit exists because hardship posts pose unique challenges to diplomats and their families, who must have excellent adaptive skills in order to adjust to extreme conditions. Promotions are often decided by tenths or even hundredths of a point, so this additional boost can be critical. 

According to the data, women are much less likely to be assigned to hardship posts in the Mexican Foreign Service. Out of all the officers that have ever been assigned to a hardship post, 82% are male. Some women report difficulties being assigned to hardship posts even when requesting to be posted there. 

Dealing with this issue is tricky, especially because some posts are specifically more challenging for women, or because there is an institutional culture that seems to suggest sometimes that women FSOs should be protected or shielded from certain work conditions. In any case, the Ministry could benefit from developing gender-sensitive guidelines to the assignment of hardship posts, taking into account women's input in the process. 

Working and Studying as an Expectant Mother

For this post, I would like to take a break from the numbers and tell you about my personal experience with this project. When I traveled to Mexico, back in May, I was 7 months pregnant with my first child. My husband and I made the trip to Mexico hoping to get as much work done as possible before our little one finally arrived. It was a wonderful experience!

I was able to walk to the Ministry offices every morning, which was really healthy for baby. Once in the office, I shared a work space with three lovely women, two of them, Hilda and Lourdes, were experienced moms who had lots of advise to dispense every day. They would also bring treats to the office, like quesadillas or freshly baked bread, and then my other colleague, Yimel, and I would listen to some of their stories about being first time moms. 

Another lovely experience was conducting interviews with fellow FSOs. As soon as they noticed I was pregnant, our conversations flowed much more freely. They seemed excited for me, and offered supportive words. This made me feel a little more calm, even as I got closer to my due date and increasingly nervous. 

Expecting and Working: That is me on the far left.

I had to complete the second half of the internship remotely, since it would not be as safe to travel after I reached eight months of pregnancy. I had collected enough information to be able to use this period to analyze the data and begin putting some puzzle pieces together. I am still working on that. 

And then, on July 16th, baby finally arrived! 

Baby Adriano

It is such a joy! My husband and I are enjoying the learning process and we love taking care of this little angel. Even though I expect work-life balance to become very challenging in the coming months, I would not have it any other way. 

The Bottleneck

Minister. This is the highest rank that you can reach in the Foreign Service via the promotion exam. The only rank higher than that, Ambassador, can only be reached by Presidential decree. Currently, Ministers are the rarest breed in the Mexican Service. Only 10% of officers are Ministers, even less than Ambassadors, who are almost 12% of active FSOs. It is a long road towards becoming a Minister. On average, it takes 27 years to reach that rank. By that time, FSOs are between the ages of 56 and 57. It's essentially a whole life's work.The rank of Minister is where we find the largest gender gap: only 19% of Ministers are women! Why?

The gap at its widest

I think I may have found some clues. It seems that men tend to be promoted from Counselor to Minister faster than women. If you take a look at the following graph, you will see the percentage of men and women promoted to Minister after spending a number of months as Counselors. You can clearly see that the men's line stays above the women's line at all times. There is a certain percentage of men that got promoted even before spending a single month as a Counselor. No women were that lucky. Next, we can see that by month 40, 25% of women had been promoted, in comparison with 35% of men. The gap closes by month 50, where 40% of all officers had been promoted, but then widens again, until month 100 (a.k.a. year 8), where only 70% of women had been promoted in contrast with 85% of men. After 100 months, women begin to catch up, but do not fully get there until month 250 (year 20!). 

Men reach the rank quicker than women

The next step is to figure out why women Counselors are being held back. Since the only way to reach the rank of Minister is through the promotion exam, I plan to carefully look at the exam results of men and women Counselors since 2002 (when the promotion exam made its debut) and try to pinpoint the main differences. Because no FSOs that entered later than 1998 have reached this rank yet, I will be concentrating only on the cohorts that entered the Foreign Service before that year. The Foreign Service was quite different then. More on that later!

Initial Findings

Diving into the numbers is becoming interesting. I am surprised at some of the differences I am beginning to uncover between male and female diplomats. It is still to early to conclude anything from the data, and I am very eager to receive feedback from expert advisors at HKS in order to devise a proper data analysis strategy, but I would like to report on my initial review of the statistics. 

This time, I will be concentrating on the promotion process. The Foreign Service strives to be a true meritocracy. Officers rise through the ranks by participating in promotion exams where they compete against their peers. Usually, the top 10-20% performers are promoted, depending on how many vacancies are available. The promotion exam has many parts. Officers receive scores according to their supervisor's and their own evaluations of their performance, their years of service, relevant academic qualifications they have acquired since their last promotion, and even points according to the degree of responsibility their specific job requires of them. These scores are then added to scores from a written and an oral exam whose purpose is to ensure their working knowledge and analytic skills are up to date. The process is quite grueling and it happens every one or two years. After looking at the data from promotion exams between 2002 and 2013, I was able to spot some interesting trends: 

• On average, women seem to receive higher scores on their evaluations in the area of academic preparation. They may be taking advantage of one of the best perks that FSOs are afforded: access to the Instituto Matías Romero's (IMR) virtual campus. The IMR is the institute in charge of training and continuing education for diplomats, and it offers all kinds of courses that are useful to them, including languages, negotiation, consular topics, international trade and finance, among many others. FSOs earn points for taking these courses, which are then counted in their promotion evaluations. The average woman scores slightly higher in academic preparation than the average man. However, when you break down the scores further, you can see that there are more men scoring at the highest levels. Considering that only the very best move up to the next rank during a promotion exam, there might be some cause for concern. 

Women score better on average, but more men achieve the highest score

• Another area in which FSOs receive scores is for the post they hold. If the job entails a higher responsibility, it is assigned more points, and vice versa. For example, FSOs that are the Head of Mission in a Consulate or Embassy, that is, they are the highest ranked officer in that office, receive higher scores than officers who perform supporting jobs. If they are posted at Headquarters, a higher responsibility job, such as an Undersecretary, will score higher than an officer in an advisory role. Since post assignments are assigned based on somewhat subjective decisions, it may be useful to look at the scores that FSOs receive in this area in order to see if there may be gender-based disadvantages for women. As we can see, women are more frequently seen in posts where they score 3, and less frequently represented in posts that earn them a 5 in comparison to men. This may be an area that the Ministry could look at if they wish to increase the representation on women in the higher ranks of diplomacy: assign them to higher responsibility posts!

We need more 5's!

There is much more to say about the stories the numbers are telling us, and I will do so in upcoming posts. Stay tuned!

Data!

Last week I was hard at work collecting data. This is every bit as unsexy as it sounds! I am putting together a database that can quantitatively track the career paths of all active Foreign Service Officers (FSO). With this information, I will hopefully be able to identify some patterns in the entry, promotion, and exit of FSOs as well as spot some differences between the carreer tracks of male and female FSOs. Putting together this dataset is very important but it is also time consuming! A lot of the information is only available on print archives and digitalization takes time and patience. 

Some days Excel is all I do!

Another task I have been focused on this week has been interviewing FSOs from all different ranks. The purpose of the interviews is to enrich the data by adding explanations that may be hard to quantify. There are many things numbers cannot tell us. Sure, we may know an officer was transferred to Paris or Nairobi at any point in time, but how can we tell how she felt about it? Can we tell if she had a mentor that suggested she accept the move? Can we numerically assess the impact on her family life? Given the importance of many of these difficult-to-measure factors on the wellbeing of a particular FSO, the interviews are crucial.

I have interviewed almost a dozen FSOs and relevant actors. There are many insights that I have acquired,but I came out with one comforting main takeaway from the many conversations I had this week. From Third Secretaries to Ambassadors, their unique stories converge into the conclusion that even though a career in diplomacy is very demanding, difficult, and full of obstacles, the balance in the end is positive. They are happy to be doing a job where they are constantly learning, negotiating, thinking, and best of all, proudly representing their country.

As for me, I feel lucky that I have been able to speak with such accomplished, strong, professional women. They are sometimes faced with difficult odds, they are forced to swim against the tide, but despite all that, they have become one of the best faces Mexico has to show to the World. I hope we can have more and more of them representing us in the future. 

Planning from an Equality Perspective

This week, I had the opportunity to attend a workshop organized by the Office of Gender Equality at the Ministry called "Toolkit for Planning with an Equality Perspective". It was conducted by Edith Olivares Ferreto, an expert on Social Anthropology, who spoke to us about how to incorporate a gender perspective into public policy planning exercises. Edith has worked with the Ministry of Social Development, the Mexican House of Representatives, UNDP, the National Institute for Women, and various state and local governments in Mexico on gender issues. The participants came from different administrative units within the Ministry and included both Foreign Service Officers as well as Ministry staff.

Staff participating in the workshop

The first section of this week-long workshop was geared towards bringing awareness to the participants about gender-related inequalities in their own workplace and personal lives. Many salient issues were mentioned, including vertical segregation, wage gaps, stereotype prevalence, uneven distribution of domestic duties, unequal access to professional, education, and economic opportunities, among many others. We also took a look at how the Mexican legal system has incorporated a gender perspective into the National Development Plan and learned that incorporating it into all public policy is one out of three cross-sectoral principles that each government agency must include in its strategic plan (the other two are democratizing productivity and modern government that is close to the people through transparency and accountability).

The second section of the workshop consisted of using the "Logical Framework Approach" to define a problem, its possible causes, and design policy alternatives that contribute towards its solution, while incorporating a gender perspective into the process. I worked in a team with three wonderful women, Bibiana, Karina, and Agustina. The problem we worked on was the under representation of non Foreign Service women in decision making posts at the Ministry Headquarters. Here's a look at the "problem tree" we used to map out causes and effects:

Quite complicated!

The workshop was one of many in a series that the Office of Gender Inequality organizes as part of an effort to address the many complex situations that arise as a result of a phenomenon that is present worldwide: gender inequality. By the end of 2014, the office had trained 204 staff members on different gender-related issues, and while much has been accomplished, much remains to be done. I was glad to be a part of this activity and will surely use the tools that I learned in the workshop during the rest of my professional and personal life. 

Gender Perspective!

Greetings from Mexico City!

Greetings from Mexico City! It is exciting to be spending the summer in this vibrant megalopolis. More than 20 million people live and breathe here, and I feel like I am at the center of it all. I very much enjoy my morning walk to work, which takes me past delicious juice and taco stands, shoe shining stations, the imposing main avenue, Paseo de la Reforma, and the beautiful Alameda Central Park, which sits right across from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, my home for the next weeks. On top of that, on Thursday, the Mexican sky sweetened my welcome with a solar halo, a beautiful rainbow-like phenomenon that forms a ring around the Sun when the clouds are very high.

The view from the office

It is now time to begin thinking about what is going on with women in the Mexican Foreign Service, but first, let me give you an overview of what the Foreign Service is and what it does. The Foreign Service is the oldest permanent civilian public service corps in the country. In 1821, barely a month after the victory over Spain in the war for independence, the new government created the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Cancillería, and tasked the new diplomatic officers with achieving official recognition of the newborn nation by foreign governments. This was absolutely necessary for the consolidation of the national project. Over time, the principal objectives of the Cancillería evolved, but the spirit remains the same. Today, the Foreign Service is in charge of representing Mexico abroad and executing the country’s foreign policy in accordance to the principles established by the Constitution. 

The Cancillería building

(photo credit Grupo Reforma)

The activities that officers carry out include promoting and safeguarding the nation’s interests, protecting the rights of Mexican citizens abroad, promoting regional and global peace and international security, and facilitating Mexico’s economic and cultural insertion in the world stage. Currently, there are 1,110 active Foreign Service Officers serving in two branches of the Foreign Service: the diplomatic-consular (DC), and the technical-administrative (TA). DC officers execute foreign policy in Embassies and Consulates around the world. TA officers are in charge of administrative and IT duties that allow the whole structure to run smoothly. My work on this project will concentrate on the DC branch, because these officers, in conjunction with politically appointed officials, make the most important foreign policy recommendations and are in charge of key decisions. It is also in this branch that we can observe the gender-gap.

The diplomatic corps is organized in a similar way to the military. It is a hierarchical structure, where officers can rise from one rank to the next based on their performance. In the DC branch, the ranks begin at Diplomatic Attaché, go through Third, Second, and First Secretary, Counselor, and Minister, until they reach the rank of Ambassador. Currently, men occupy 72% of ambassadorships, 82% of Minister posts, and 74% of Counsellor posts. Those percentages drop steadily until they reach 62% of Third Secretaries. In all, 69% of Mexican DC diplomats are male and only 31% are female.

There are many probable reasons that may explain this, but for now, we can only hypothesize. The lives of diplomats seem glamorous, but they also present great professional and personal challenges for those who have embarked on that path. Moving often, having a family, learning to negotiate across cultural differences, and transitioning to a new set of objectives with each government change are some examples.  We will be going through each one during the coming weeks, and hopefully, arrive at an evidence-based answer about the different obstacles that men and women face when trying to advance in their diplomatic career. Let’s get started!