Vol.:(0123456789) Place Branding and Public Diplomacy https://doi.org/10.1057/s41254-021-00251-1 ORIGINAL ARTICLE On being a woman in public diplomacy: some personal reflections Nancy Snow 1,2 Revised: 28 October 2021 / Accepted: 5 November 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2021 Abstract A former government official of an independent foreign affairs agency reflects on her experience as a woman in public diplomacy. Keywords Gender · Diplomacy · Feminism · International relations · Public diplomacy · Foreign policy My path has been a bit unconventional. After a Fulbright fel- lowship to Germany right after my B.A. studies, I applied to doctoral programs in political science. I earned my Ph.D. in International Relations from American University’s School of International Service, despite acceptance into Ph.D. pro- grams in political science from Rice and MIT, my father’s respective undergraduate and graduate alma maters in elec- trical engineering. He was not sold on a doctorate in the social sciences. He would have been bursting at the seams if I had been accepted into engineering. He thought that postgraduate social science study was a dead-end career. If I couldn’t find a teaching opening at a university I might end up driving a taxi. Of course, there is nothing wrong with driving a taxi during or after Ph.D. studies, but dad was in the much more secure field of applied science. I’m happy to say that he did come around to supporting my academic career, but when I was choosing where to go for graduate school, I felt very much on my own in making such a life- changing choice. I was also the youngest and only daughter with four older brothers, only one of whom pursued post- graduate education. No one in the family imagined the little sister or daughter as a college professor and scholar. Telling America’s official story in Washington Upon completing my Ph.D., I worked at a foreign affairs agency in Washington, DC known quite well to the public diplomacy community of scholars, the United States Infor- mation Agency (USIA). I didn’t know until I began to work there that USIA and its subsidiary, the Voice of America (VOA), were defendants in a sex discrimination lawsuit for excluding and manipulating over 1,100 women in hiring and employment practices in the 1970s and 1980s (Fletcher 2000). The Voice of America women plaintiffs were openly told that they weren’t being hired because listeners preferred male over female voices. Male voices sounded more in com- mand on air and women applicants were told this in job interviews. Qualifying exam results were manipulated in order to hire men over equally qualified women, which may seem archaic but isn’t. In 2018 Tokyo Medical University admitted altering entry exam results to favor male applicants and to keep women applicants to under 30 percent, despite women outperforming men at larger numbers (Wheeler 2018). University management was said to be worried that its female graduates would leave medical practice early in order to raise a family (Yamaguchi 2018). The over half a billion payout in the USIA/VOA case was announced during women’s history month on March 22, 2000 (Molotsky 2000). The settlement took 23 years to come to fruition and remains the largest award for an employment discrimination case in the history of the Civil Rights Act (Miller and Vise 2000). A record-breaking sex discrimination lawsuit is surely one way to tell America’s story to the world. I was onboarded into federal government work through a two-year management training program called The * Nancy Snow nsnow@fullerton.edu 1 Professor Emeritus, California State University, Fullerton, CA, USA 2 Pax Mundi Professor of Public Diplomacy, Department of Global Studies, Kyoto University of Foreign Studies, 6 Saiinkasamechō, Ukyo Ward, Kyoto 615-8558, Japan