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!