ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 26, 1997 TAG: 9701290001
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: BOB DEANS COX NEWS SERVICE
In a November speech, Madeleine Albright offered a characteristically vivid appraisal of women's gains in the starchy field of foreign affairs.
``It used to be that the only way a woman could truly make her foreign policy views felt was by marrying a diplomat - and then pouring tea on an offending ambassador's lap,'' she quipped before the Women's Foreign Policy Group. ``Today, women are engaged in every facet of global affairs.''
Albright will add new meaning to those gains as the first woman to serve as U.S. secretary of state. After swift Senate confirmation, she was sworn in Friday.
President Clinton named Albright, 59, last month to succeed outgoing Warren Christopher as the top U.S. diplomat.
Not since Margaret Thatcher governed Britain has a woman occupied a post casting a global shadow on this scale. In a job that will position her across the negotiating table from the world's most powerful leaders, Albright will send an unmistakable message about women in the workplace.
At home, her appointment shatters one of the last remaining glass ceilings in U.S. government, setting a new tone for professional women in private business as well as in government.
``She can serve as a real role model for women in this country and around the world, to show that accomplished women merit holding the highest-level positions in international affairs,'' said Patricia Ellis, executive director of the Women's Foreign Policy Group, which links more than 300 women working in international affairs. ``She's a pioneer, and it's historic.''
Since Thomas Jefferson became the first U.S. secretary of state in 1790, the post has been occupied by an unbroken succession of men. For two centuries, they sat atop an overwhelmingly male club of diplomats, academicians, analysts and spies who formulate and execute foreign policy.
As recently as the 1970s, the State Department generally consigned women to clerical and administrative slots. Women were expected to resign even those positions if they got married, on the belief that they couldn't successfully juggle the duties of homemaker and foreign service officer.
``When I joined the foreign service in 1965, the senior officers had a view that the heavy lifting of political and economic diplomacy was best left to men,'' said F.A. ``Tex'' Harris, president of the American Foreign Service Association, the trade and union group representing U.S. diplomats. ``That was the old boy view.''
That view was challenged, however, in a 1976 class action suit charging that the State Department's rigid testing system unfairly winnowed out women before they could get hired, and that its pay, promotion and awards policies hamstrung women's careers once they got in the door.
``We were alleging discrimination across the board,'' said Monica Wagner, a lawyer who represents hundreds of women State Department employees in the suit, aspects of which are still pending in federal court.
Along with federal anti-discrimination laws dating to the 1960s, the lawsuit and a series of injunctions and consent decrees that have flowed out of it have helped to transform the climate for women at the State Department.
When Margaret Dean joined the diplomatic corps as a junior officer in 1976, for instance, she could count on two hands the number of women in decision-making roles.
``Looking for a colleague, looking for somebody to talk to, looking for somebody to be a girl with and do girl talk, there wasn't really much choice,'' Dean said. ``There was no network'' for women diplomats. ``There wasn't a positive environment.''
Today, Dean, division chief for senior level personnel assignments at the State Department, is a key player in upper-tier promotion decisions.
Women now make up nearly half of the State Department's new recruits and about one-third of the 720 senior diplomats in Washington and at U.S. embassies around the world. Of the 32 officers who have regular contact with the secretary of state, nine are women.
That's a better climate for females than the private sector, where women have made enormous strides in midlevel management but still account for just 10 percent of the corporate officers, according to a 1996 survey by the Catalyst group, a New York think tank that tracks women in the workplace.
Further, as the result of a February 1996 court order, the State Department has created a diversity training program aimed at sensitizing employees to the concerns of women and minorities. It also has an in-house oversight panel called the Council for Equality in the Workplace and a working group that examines how awards are meted out. In the works is an overview of how women are evaluated on the job and a review of how to reduce an alleged male bias in the foreign service exam.
While the State Department has moved aggressively over the past two decades to advance the station of women in diplomacy, Wagner said more work remains to be done.
For example, she said there still aren't enough women at the critical No. 2 slots in U.S. embassies - there are 18 women out of a total of 128 deputy chiefs of mission worldwide.
The appointment of Albright - who bounced back from a 1983 divorce to raise three daughters as a single working mom - will give additional momentum to efforts to level the playing field for women in foreign affairs, Wagner said.
``It's enormously important, I think, to women in this country and to women at the State Department,'' Wagner said. ``What we're talking about is ending sex discrimination at the State Department.''
LENGTH: Medium: 98 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Madeleine Albright Secretary of state. color.by CNB