Gender, Diplomacy and Symbolic Representation

Abstract: For many diplomats, an appointment as ambassador is the highlight of a career, yet women are underrepresented in these career-making appointments. In addition, most existing research on contemporary diplomacy often lacks a gender-sensitive lens and typically focuses on diplomats from the West. Thus, using Towns and Niklasson’s pioneering article “Gender, International Status, and Ambassador Appointments” (2017) as a point of departure, the first key intervention of this thesis is to update the mapping of gender and global ambassador appointments to investigate whether women are overrepresented among ambassadors appointed from the Middle East to the United States. The second key intervention is to investigate what symbolic meaning these women ambassadors carry for a U.S. audience when appointed to the United States. This thesis takes a feminist constructivist approach to these topics and implements a mixed-methods research design, consisting of simple descriptive statistics and an in-depth qualitative text analysis. Ultimately, my study finds that women are overrepresented among ambassadors posted from the Middle East to the United States, and that most of them carry various symbolic meanings for a U.S. audience. However, the extent of their symbolic representation is often dependent on the relationship between their individual countries and the United States.