Beyond a feminist approach to international law and diplomacy, reflections
By Celine Lange
Published on 8 March 2023
On 15 February 2023, the first Singapore Roundtable on Women Leaders in International Law and Diplomacy (‘Singapore Roundtable’) was held, gathering more than 80 law practitioners, members of the diplomatic corps and associations’ representatives. This event was co-hosted by the Centre for International Law (CIL) and the Embassy of Ireland in Singapore. It aimed to bring together women and men in leading roles in international diplomacy and international law in Singapore, to discuss gender imbalance in these fields and future prospects, share experiences and highlight key challenges. The Singapore Roundtable featured a first panel on Women in Diplomacy, with Ms Eugenia Barthelmess (Ambassador of Brazil to Singapore), Ms Charlotte Lobe (High Commissioner of South Africa to Singapore) and Ms Iwona Piorko (Ambassador of the European Union to Singapore). The second panel on Women in International Law featured Ms Daphne Hong (Solicitor-General and Director-General, International Affairs Division) and Ms Natalie Morris-Sharma (Director, International Legal Division), both from the Attorney-General’s Chambers, and Ms Loretta Malintoppi (Independent Arbitrator). The panels were respectively moderated by Ambassador of Ireland to Singapore Sarah McGrath and Dr Nilüfer Oral (Director of CIL). This blog post presents selected salient points of the discussion and some reflections, in particular on the meaning of a feminist approach to women’s representation in international law and diplomacy today.
The public service
According to the Women in Diplomacy Index 2022, of the total 4,293 ambassadors currently appointed across 40 countries and the European Union, only 927 are women. Data also show significant geographic disparities, as the percentage of women in ambassadorship positions is 35.7% in North America, compared to 13.7% in Asia. Several speakers at the Singapore Roundtable were ‘first’ women in their roles: first woman ambassador of Brazil to Singapore, first female Director General at the Attorney General’s Chambers, first woman appointed ambassador of Singapore to the United States and to Ireland.
In her keynote address, Ms Foo Chi Hsia (Deputy Secretary, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Singapore) insisted that public service career tracks needed to accommodate the various life stages of women and that the workplace in general should be a safe space to talk about maternity. It was also noted by several speakers that the equal gender representation seen at entry levels in the public service was not reflected in senior positions. Despite the fact that most foreign services are recruiting an ever-larger number of female candidates at entry level positions, diplomacy still lags behind on gender balance, especially in leading positions.
While it is encouraging to observe that the United Nations Secretariat has achieved full gender equality at senior leadership level in 2018, numbers vary significantly across UN agencies, funds, and programmes. A recruitment and promotion system historically based on nationality, as well as resistance from staff and members states, have been slowing down the process that started 24 years ago with the adoption of the General Assembly’s resolution on the Improvement of the status of women in the Secretariat.
International law
Women judges in international courts also remains underrepresented. In 2018, the African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights was the first among international courts and tribunals to achieve gender parity. As for the International Criminal Court (ICC), the Rome Statute requests State Parties to ‘take into account the need for a fair representation of female and male judges’ at the ICC, which now counts 50% of women judges. However, with respectively 23% and 26% of women judges, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) have yet to reach parity. As for international courts’ presidencies, it is only in 2022 that a woman was for the first time elected President of the European Court of Human Rights. Although Joan E. Donoghe has been the President of the ICJ since 2021, she is only the second woman to have held this position since the ICJ was established.
Dr Nilüfer Oral highlighted the historically extremely limited participation of women in international law-making with statistics on the International Law Commission (ILC). In its first 70 years, the ILC had indeed elected only a total of seven women members, and it was not until 2001 that the first two women were elected. In 2020 a record number of 10 women were nominated by their governments to the ILC, but in the elections held in 2021 the membership of women increased by a total of only one woman, from four to five.
Nonetheless in the field of international arbitration, the proportion of women appointed as arbitrators has grown from 12.5% in 2015 to 26.1% in 2021. As noted by Ms Malintoppi, arbitral institutions have played a major role in expanding the pool of female arbitrators, as about half of women arbitrators are appointed by such institutions when discharging their functions as appointing authorities. While parties to arbitration have the potential to make an even larger impact due to the large number of appointments they make every year, the proportion of women party-appointed arbitrators is currently only 17.9%.
A feminist approach?
Some of the Singapore Roundtable speakers emphasised that women in diplomacy and international law undoubtedly bring specific qualities to the table, such as active listening, the ability to find consensus, a great flexibility of judgement and a capacity to consider long term factors in a negotiation. It is also sometimes argued that a business case can be made for greater women’s representation as gender diversity would lead to improved team performance and productivity.
While the mere suggestion of a need for a business case or the demonstration of specific qualities might stir up counterproductive confusion, a less questionable point to make is that women’s representation is a simple question of democratic representation, as Ambassador Barthelmess underlined. The objective set for the European Union institutions, Ambassador Piorko shared, was 50% of women in the decision-making positions, a target that has almost been attained with women making 40% of the European Parliament, and thus nearly participating on an equal footing in EU law-making.
Does the democratic representation argument lead to the ‘slippery slope of mirror representation’ (‘an exact portrait, in miniature, of the people at large’)? A straightforward and self-explanatory response to this concern is that women represent at least half of the worldwide adult population. Applying this basic fact to the field of international law, not having half of the sky’s distinctive experience of the world factored in the making and practice of international law significantly deprives it of its ‘universal validity’, as set forth by Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin and Shelley Wright in their famous Feminist Approaches to International Law in 1996.
Changing the laws, and the conversation
Several Singapore Roundtable speakers insisted on the importance of legal reforms. Ambassador McGrath recalled that Ireland, in the context of its accession to the EU, got rid of the ‘marriage ban’, which legally required women in the Irish civil service to retire from employment after marriage. Ambassador Lobe also highlighted that in South Africa legislation had to be passed for the presidential cabinet to achieve 50% of female representation.
The importance of legal reforms at a global level was one of Ambassador-At-Large Chan Heng Chee’s two main closing remarks at the Singapore Roundtable. According to a World Bank’s report, 2.4 billion women are of working age but live in countries where they face legal barriers to their employment, and according to a World Economic Forum’s report, it will, at the current pace, take 132 more years to reach gender parity.
In her second point, Ambassador Chan argued that it was time to switch the conversation from ‘gender equality’ to ‘diversity’. As underlined by Ambassador McGrath, female representation is a test for greater diversity: if gender balance is not achieved in an organisation, it is doubtful that different voices in terms of geography, age, nationality, backgrounds etc. are at all included.
Furthermore, as pointed out by Ms Morris-Sharma, even in societies where numerical diversity seems satisfactory, work still needs to be done on mentalities and the traditional representation of gender roles. There is for instance a long-lasting separation between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ portfolios in the public service, even if some speakers shared that they had personally experienced progress on this front since the beginning of their careers. In this context, Ms Malintoppi emphasised that women need to put themselves ‘out there’. They tend, noted Ms Hong, to set up their own limitations. Instead, when opportunities occur, ‘women have a responsibility to take on the challenge and set an example.’
In 2018, the Law Society of England and Wales compiled the largest ever global survey on women in the law. The respondents considered that women lawyers had to continue building their self-confidence, by creating mentorship and learning spaces, in order to innovate as individuals through knowledge-sharing with other jurisdictions and industries. To facilitate discussions among female lawyers, the Law Society has developed the International Women in Law roundtable methodology to help identify issues and appropriate strategies. On 15 February 2023, the Singapore Roundtable has started the conversation here too, with the same ultimate goal to generate transformative changes within organisations for women in international law and diplomacy.