I am a woman with a postgraduate degree in International Security and I am finding it incredibly hard to break into the world of think tanks.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/kellycdavis

Interesting article, I very much enjoyed reading it. Clinton's been an excellent Secretary of State, we need more women like her in public service.

Speaking as young man with some small claim to intelligence and education, I can say that I expect that this gender gap will change sooner rather than later. The author is right to point to the demographics of colleges and graduate programs. The policymakers of the future, men and women, are conditioned by intellectual environments with a more even gender balance. Current grad students and twenty-somethings have a wealth of experience in taking women seriously, since as often as not it has been women who were their professors or intellectual peers. When I reflect on my undergrad experience it's probably accurate to say that most of the people I considered as serious competition were female. I don't think that there's any way that this generational shift won't alter the professional environment in favor of women; the young men I respect are uniformly interested in working with the most qualified and capable people, and used to environments where many of the best people were women.

The other thread that drew my interest was the comment about attitudes encountered by a stay at home husband. That's something I don't expect to change. Frankly speaking, I don't think I could ever accept a marital situation like that and I think I'd think less of a friend who did. I'm not saying women should be in a professionally subordinate marital role. The most successful marriages and relationships I see in my age group are those where the partners are professionally and educationally comparable, and they go through a difficult process of maintaining an equilibrium of ambitions. It puts strain on relationships, but I can't see it going any other way-- the ambition and pride of capable young men is such as precludes any kind of subordinate relationship behavior. "Wife and mother" is a position that held a certain kind of circumscribed respect under the pre-feminist gender regime; I can't imagine a similar role being found for men in a more gender-neutral post-feminist world.

Here's another issue created by the lack of women in think tanks is that we have fewer people to introduce whatever the next brilliant theory is. For all academics and policy a diverse environment with many different minds is a necessity, you don't get quality work from an orthodox mentality*.

*With no intention of suggesting anything about religions which use the word 'Orthodox'.

BTW, feminism is arguably an unmatched unchallenged ideology which is serving to empower women OVER men in ways that men never had over women.

quote -"It stands to reason that a national security establishment that speaks to women as well as men in the United States and around the world is a necessity, not an option."

Ms. Hurlburt - that national security has to pander to either sexes, let alone to foreigners, just begs the question; what about the LGBT community world-wide? Shouldn't they be included in the kumbaya dialogue you deem a necessity?

It's obviously a slow week at FP. They're having trouble finding timely areas of discussion. Since women obviously can't make it on their own, let's make sure they get some special assistance!

As a PhD student in International Relations at a top twenty university, I can assure the several incredulous commenters that gender imbalance in the security policy making field is problematic. Security policy is often influenced far more by the old, discredited systemic theories of old white men. Some of the best security scholars in academia today are women - Brett Ashley Leeds, Virginia Page Fortna, and Barbara Walter (no - not the host of the View) all come directly to mind. Moreover, these security scholars focus on the most pressing issues in security studies today - civil wars, intervention, war cessation, etc.

The disconnect between the policy world and the academic world, which is fueled by an "old boys club" that privileges stale, tired world-views over dynamic, new ways of thinking about security, is in large part entrenched precisely because the paucity of women in the security policy space amounts to a tacit assessment that men are somehow better at security.

The vast majority of my best students are women. Yet, these women have much more difficulty even getting the high-level internships required to break into the security policy world. In the end, the best minds are not getting the opportunity to contribute meaningfully to the policy debate.

For USAMA2 and SGK12, I'd say two things:
1) Never once in this article did the author suggest that women should receive special assistance. Instead, she draws attention to a disparity in the security policy profession, explains why this inequality is a problem, and then states that in order to fix this problem, we need to acknowledge its existence and its cause. No talk of firing all the men in order to hire more women.

2) To say that feminism is an unchallenged theory that tries to subjugate men is so ridiculous and misinformed, it would be laughable if attitudes such as yours were not so widely held and so destructive. First, it is difficult to assign a blanket definition of feminism, since there are many different feminist groups with slightly different goals. But, what united feminists is a belief that women are not inferior to men (notice, the belief is not that women are superior to men), and that centuries of a patriarchal culture has created a society in which women are devalued and face much more limited choices in how to live their lives than men do (central to feminism theory is the concept of false choice, in which women in liberal democracies might have statutory rights equal to men's, but that social pressures make it impossible for women to actually have the same degree of freedom of choice as men do).

I suspect the same problem exists in every Western country ro a greater or lesser extent. Thwe question is how do you solve it? There is no Head of HR you can call in to face the music. Also it is clearly not just a matter of access but of choices freely made to specialise in other area. However I am happy to sing FP's praises for making this a big issue for us all to ponder.

Several women disagreed strongly that ladies avoid researching or focusing on "hard power" methods to U.S. foreign policy. On the related note, several also explained the issue is less about hard power and much more concerning the predominant Washington-centric focus. As you colleague noted, Women may begin to see the other side´s perspective, and ladies see a lesser zero-sum game.

Lots of men and ladies wrote to share the burn the fat review of women's under-representation in their own individual think tank, government agency, or military services was either much worse or a lot better than the information during my piece found. For instance, I had been told in regards to a "win" inside an intelligence community agency to get use of a lactation room, as opposed to the previously assigned broom closet.