Social Progress and Female Ambassadors

To commemorate International Women in Diplomacy Day, we demonstrated there is a positive association between the percentage of women in the diplomatic corps and our Global Social Progress Index. However, not all positions in diplomacy are the same, and we wanted to explore what happens when we zoom in on Female Ambassadors only.

At first glance, the comparisons have little difference, but the general trend is not the same in all cases. If we zoom in, we can see that some high performers that neatly do better than their peers in Women in Diplomacy, such as Finland and Sweden, fall behind when analyzing only their Female Ambassadors. 

However, this also occurs with low performers, with the exceptions of Suriname and Jamaica. This demonstrates that while there is a generally positive relationship between social progress and Women in Diplomacy, a country’s score cannot be associated equally with the percentage of Women in Diplomacy and Female Ambassadors, as cases behave differently across regions and tiers.

Check out the complete analysis to see how individual countries do in both comparisons. You can also navigate different Dimensions, Components, and Indicators of the Index.