Three Types of Welfare Regime in Diplomacy: On the Degrees of Patriarchy in Ministries of Foreign Affairs

This study examines the emancipatory potential of institutional welfare and family policies that may influence gender representation within state foreign services. It develops the argument commonly shared in the literature on women and gender in diplomacy, namely that appropriate recognition of maternity rights for female diplomats and diplomatic spouses’ social and labour rights in the ministerial institutional structure has profound implications for the ability of women to pursue their careers in diplomacy. Combining this assumption with the feminist conceptualisation of welfare regime and a comprehensive collection of sources on 17 European foreign services, this paper proposes a typology of three welfare regimes in foreign service: women- and family-unfriendly, women friendly and family-unfriendly, and supportive. The paper claims that the proposed typology helps to move from the widely shared single-case research design towards a multiple-case research scenario, and that it thereby enhances our comparative thinking and consideration of general trends in studying the institutional structures of diplomacy. At the practical level, the study points out the necessity to adjust the women and family-unfriendly features of welfare regimes in foreign service in order to move towards equal levels of male and female representation in higher diplomatic ranks.