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.