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ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Rose Gottemoeller of the State Department is the first woman to negotiate a major U.S. arms-control treaty, the New START initiative.
MANDEL NGAN/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Michele Flournoy, the Defense Department’s undersecretary for policy, is one of the highest-ranking women in Pentagon history.
DANIEL MIHAILESCU/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Ellen O. Tauscher, a State Department undersecretary and former congresswoman from California, helped close the deal for New START.
HEKTOR PUSTINA/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Marcie Ries is deputy assistant secretary for strategic affairs at the State Department. She was Gottemoeller’s deputy in the New START negotiations.
STATE DEPARTMENT
Senior verification official Karin Look helped oversee the dismantling of Libya’s nuclear weapons program. “From me to the secretary, it’s all female.”
CHRIS KLEPONIS/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Under Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, women play a big role in nuclear talks. But the trend began before the Obama administration, officials say.
In new era of nuclear talks, more women are at the table nuclear from A1
security officials. Women occupy between 21 and 29 percent of the senior positions at the State De- partment, USAID, the Pentagon and other national security and foreign policy agencies, accord- ing to a recent survey by Women in International Security, a pro- fessional group. About 13 percent of the Senior Intelligence Service is female, it found. “We’re really at a very critical
juncture in the field at large. We’ve had many more women than we’ve ever seen,” said Jo- lynn Shoemaker, executive direc- tor of the group. “It’s particularly visible in this administration.” Current and former officials
say the increase is not just due to the Obama administration. Gradually, the women who began taking national security jobs in the military, the diplomatic serv- ice, think tanks and other insti- tutions in the 1970s and 1980s are rising to the top. They include people such as
Michele Flournoy, the Defense Department’s undersecretary for policy and one of the highest- ranking women in Pentagon his- tory; Letitia A. Long, who recent- ly was named to run the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; and Laura Holgate, a top nuclear official with the National Securi- ty Council.
“We’re not overnight success-
es,” said Susan Burk, a 34-year government employee and the top U.S. official at the recent re- view of the nuclear Non-Prolifer- ation Treaty. Perhaps “we have to work more years to get to these positions.”
Collaboration
Nuclear experts dismiss the idea that the expanding role of women has changed policy. While the cliche persists that women are more peace-loving than men, “I have certainly never seen that,” Look said. But she and several other women said female leaders can often have a more collaborative style. Women are “perhaps more at- tuned to working on teams, which I think is vitally important if you’re going to have a good ne- gotiation,” said Laura Kennedy, U.S. ambassador to the Geneva- based Conference on Disarma- ment. Kennedy began her career at the State Department in 1975, three years after authorities lift- ed a ban on married women in the diplomatic service. “There really were very few women in the State Department,” she said. “It’s been an enormous transformation over the years.” As Kennedy was getting her start as a young diplomat in Mos-
cow, Gottemoeller began tack- ling nuclear issues as a Russia analyst at the Rand Corp. She be- came a junior member of the del- egation that negotiated the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which was signed in 1991. Those lengthy negotiations in Geneva “were a great incubator for the generation that’s of age today,” including several current female nuclear officials, Gottemoeller said.
Still, it wasn’t always easy be- ing a woman in the U.S. delega-
tion back then. Linton Brooks, the chief U.S. negotiator at the time, remembers how one Soviet official balked at negotiating with a female American diplo- mat. The next time that Soviet offi- cial held a meeting, Brooks sent the American woman back — with six other women. “You had to make it very clear
that some other delegations may have had issues, but I certainly didn’t,” Brooks said. These days, most of that overt
discrimination is over. In U.S. nu- clear policy circles, it has gone virtually unnoticed that Gotte- moeller is the first woman to ne- gotiate a major U.S. arms-control treaty. “Internally it doesn’t attract
any attention at all,” Brooks said. “It’s just, ‘Of course Rose is the negotiator. She’s the right per- son.’ ” Female American nuclear ex-
perts may still attract attention abroad, but several said their gender has little impact on their work. In fact, when Gottemoeller was named head of the U.S. del- egation for New START, one Rus- sian military newspaper warned of the “danger” in striking a deal with a woman who had run the Moscow Carnegie Center and had an “inside knowledge of Moscow’s logic.”
Still, ‘minority status’
Despite their advances, Amer- ican women are still nowhere near equality in terms of their share of senior national security jobs. The recent report by Women
FERNANDO RICARDO/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, right, and Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev sign a protocol to the original Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty on May 23, 1992, in Lisbon.
in International Security noted that female professionals “have remained acutely aware of their minority status in many interna- tional security environments.” And many of the women inter- viewed for the study “pointed to
a need to establish credibility quickly, especially in the defense, intelligence and law enforce- ment areas, and acknowledged that this was sometimes diffi- cult.” In addition, women faced “unique challenges” balancing work and family, it said. Gottemoeller said her most
difficult years professionally were when her two children were growing up. In 1993, after the election of Bill Clinton, she was offered a job on the National Se- curity Council, which is famous for its grueling hours. Her hus- band, also a State Department employee, agreed to pick up more of the parenting responsi- bilities. “My husband and I had a deal.
He said, two years in the NSC. And that’s it. And I said okay. It worked for us,” she said. “Luckily in those two years we were able to get the deal struck where we were able to get nukes out of Ka- zakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus” after the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
During the latest negotiations,
Gottemoeller noted that the Rus- sian Foreign Ministry actually in- cluded a few young women in its delegation. “Things are changing,” she
said, “even in their government.”
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