6th March 2013 Paris, France
Celebrating International Women’s Day
This week on the 8th of March, it’s International Women’s Day, and we are very active in the Embassy in celebrating it. There are two events in particular that I’ve been personally engaged with – and I bring to this a very passionate belief that organisations are better when we have more women in senior positions. It’s good for the business, it’s good for the atmosphere in which everybody works – and it’s only fair to women.
Written version (continued)
We had a debate last night in the Embassy with four senior women who have made it to top positions in France : 3 French women and, actually, a Welsh lady who has a senior position in Sodexo. They talked about their own personal experiences, and there was a debate around the theme of “What can businesses bring to women” and also what do women bring when they are in senior positions in businesses. In amongst which, the panel discussed corporate social responsibility, and how firms, businesses and organisations can make a difference in their charitable work, outside the world of business.
There is still much to be done, including in government. I personally will be going on Friday to the Quai d’Orsay’s [French Foreign Affairs Ministry] celebration on International Women’s Day. I was invited to talk about what I did when I was permanent Secretary in the Foreign Office to increase the representation of women in more senior positions in our organisation.
Diplomacy is not an easy career for anybody but certainly not for women, given the obligations to be mobile, given the uncertainties about where you will be posted and the complexities of bringing up a family in those circumstances. And we have traditionally in the FCO lost a large number of our women staff in the first 10 or 15 years of the career.
I’m glad to say that with some of the changes we brought in during my time, that has improved. When I arrived in that job we had 17 women in ambassadorial positions, today we have 37. Here at the Embassy, my Deputy Head of Mission (DHM) and Counsellor Europe and Global Issues are women. You can read Kara Owen’s (DHM) post as guest blogger of the “FCO women’s stories” on my blog.
It’s still not enough, but it is a progress, and we have a higher percentage of women in senior management jobs. A lot of that has been about transparency in promotions and postings (that helps women if things are more transparent) and about flexibility of how to achieve your job without necessarily spending long hours in the office. Still much to be done – but I’m delighted to be able to go to share that experience with our French colleagues.
Our work on women’s rights will continue well beyond Women’s Day. My Foreign Minister William Hague is making a priority at the G8 Foreign Ministers meeting in April of an initiative to prevent the use of violence against women in zones of war and conflict, and we will come back to that issue, I hope with a guest speaker, on our website soon. You can follow all that on our social networking sites.