AT THE end of every summer, the French diplomatic service summons all its ambassadors from around the world to Paris for a week of brainstorming and fine cuisine. Usually, the assembled crowd is monochrome, middle-aged and male. This year, however, it was marked by a shock of silk scarves and coloured jackets: nearly a third of the ambassadorial corps was made up of women, compared to 19% in Britain and 26% in America.
Little-noticed outside the foreign-policy world, France has transformed the place of female diplomats. Currently 48 of its ambassadors are women, a record; and women won 29% of all new ambassadorial appointments last year, up from 11% in 2012. “We’ve now achieved a critical mass,” says one of them. “Our presence has gone from remarkable to commonplace.”
This has not happened without an official push, and decades of frustration for some. A few years ago, a nominations committee queried whether one female candidate had “broad enough shoulders” for a senior foreign post (she still got it). But in 2012 France decided to reserve a share of top public-…