(Non-)Working Girls: How the Foreign Service Leaves Women Behind
Women's empowerment is a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy, but are we living our values?
A couple weeks ago, I stopped into Embassy Amman’s Community Liaison Office, or CLO. Its stark white walls and scratchy blue carpet—the hallmarks of corporate America, copied and pasted into the Middle East—had been made to look inviting with a couple homey touches: clusters of potted plants, a seating area, a picnic table with sign-up sheets for family events.
I was there to listen to a pitch about Embassy job openings reserved for the spouses, or “eligible family members,” of full-time employees, known as “direct hires.” So, the pitch was for people like me. I’m already gainfully employed and have no immediate plans to leave my job, but I’d be doing myself a disservice if I didn’t explore all the opportunities available to me, so I swapped my telework sweatpants for a pair of jeans and headed to the CLO.
I was intrigued to attend because I’d heard that the handful of roles being discussed that day were more substantive and better paid than the typical jobs for family members, which, I’ve found, tend to be menial work that starts in the $40-50k range. As I sat on a stiff, scratchy couch and waited for the briefing to begin, I looked around to see if I knew anyone in the room—maybe I could put a face to the name of someone from the ladies-only WhatsApp groups, where we organized yoga classes, lunch outings, and bunco nights—and it hit me: all ten of us were women. Not a single man in sight.
I began to do some quick mental math. If the Foreign Service were split more or less evenly between men and women, and the women were in heterosexual partnerships at the same rate as the men—both of which seemed reasonable assumptions, in the Year of Our Lord 2024, over a century after Lucile Atcherson Curtis became the first woman admitted to the Foreign Service—roughly half the spouses in the room should be male. And yet, there we were, a gaggle of women and exactly zero men.
Either the makeup of that room was a statistical anomaly, or it was visual confirmation of what I’d always known to be true: that women make up nowhere near half of the Foreign Service corps, and at the same time make up an even larger majority of supporting spouses than the ratio of female to male direct hires would suggest. I thought of a friend who recently turned down an offer to join the Foreign Service as her husband’s career couldn’t support remote work. I thought of several female coworkers who’d reached out to me about how I managed to telework overseas, hoping they could replicate my arrangement in support of their own Foreign Service officer husbands. I thought of how strange it was that, of the small handful of male eligible family members (EFMs) I’d known in Cairo, they all seemed to have found work at the Embassy, when so many women couldn’t.
I suspected these anecdotes were symptoms of a much larger problem at U.S. embassies overseas—one where women are consistently excluded from the officer ranks and are chronically underemployed. I set to work looking for data that would prove or disprove that theory. What I found was that my experience in the CLO wasn’t a statistical anomaly, but the logical conclusion of a system that was built on the backs of women, one that has long exploited their labor.