The making of a gender-balanced foreign service
Stories from the women driving Canada’s diplomatic corps toward equality
Forty years ago, life as a diplomat in Canada’s foreign ministry headquarters in Ottawa looked very different than it does today. Foreign service officers who joined the department as recently as the late 1970s and early 1980s remember it as an old boys’ club — the men arrived at work every day in suits and ties and answered their phones by giving their surnames, and the duties of most women in the department were secretarial.
It wasn’t unusual to come in late and browse The Globe and Mail for awhile — The New York Times would arrive later in the day. Some employees smoked at their desks, and if officers went out for a leisurely lunch, hard liquor was often involved. When five o’clock rolled around, it was common to gather in the deputy director’s office, where discussion could go on for hours about Canada’s policies in the world. It was a time regarded by some male diplomats as one of “fierce debate” and “extraordinary camaraderie.”
Angela Bogdan remembers this period differently. She was the single mother of a young son when she began her diplomatic career, having packed her things and made the drive from Toronto to Ottawa to take a job offer. When she married and had her second child, a daughter, in the mid-1980s, new mothers in the foreign service, as in the rest of the public service, could only avail themselves of 15 weeks of leave on unemployment insurance or use sick leave.
Bogdan returned to work while her daughter was still an infant and was determined to breastfeed for as long as she could, which involved leaving at a regular hour in the evening. “I kept this all quiet and focused on my work, but by 5:00 p.m., I needed to get home,” she recalled. Such a departure time was inconsistent with the prevailing culture, when officers, especially junior ones, were expected to work well into the night.
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