The research project 'An examination of women’s leadership in multilateral diplomacy' is a recorded series of conversations between recognised scholars in the field and women who have exercised leadership in multilateral diplomacy. The experiences of women leaders we speak to will inform an analysis of broader obstacles to leadership in international organisations and diplomatic negotiations. The project aims to understand the causes of potentially changing gender and organisational structures, the gender bias landscape, the social norms that could guide larger scale change as well as the complex multinational environment which is also likely to pose different kinds of challenges and opportunities to women’s leadership.
In addition to the recorded conversations, the project will produce a report summarising lessons learned from those conversations, integrating them with findings from the scholarly literature on women’s leadership, and providing practical guidelines and recommendations for policy-makers, practitioners and experts on improving women’s representation.
The report with conclusions from this research project will be published in spring/summer 2024.
The project is ongoing, and you can find more information about the recorded conversations below and here. You can find all recorded conversations on Spotify.
The project is ongoing and to-date, we collaborated with the following women leaders: Director-General of the World Trade Organization, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala; British Ambassador to the United States, Ambassador Karen Pierce; former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Ambassador Patricia Espinosa; Former Vice President of the European Commission and High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Baroness Catherine Ashton; Ambassador of Canada to the World Trade Organization and Permanent Representative of Canada to the Permanent Mission of Canada in Geneva, Ambassador Nadia Theodore; Gambian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom and former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, H.E. Fatou Bensouda; and the following academics and practitioners with expertise in leadership and diplomacy: Dr Rosa Balfour (Carnegie Europe), Professor Pamela Blackmon (Pennsylvania State University, Altoona), Dr Ingvild Bode (University of Southern Denmark), Kamya Choudhary (London School of Economics), Henriette Müller (New York University Abu Dhabi), The project has also been endorsed by Dame Minouche Shafik, the former President and Vice-Chancellor of LSE.