By Dr. Joan Johnson-Freese
Careers related to national security are not for the faint of heart, especially when it comes to women. The vast majority of women I have had the pleasure to work with have been confident, capable, and tenacious. They know that women don’t have to be just capable, they have to be hyper-capable. The problem is they must also be careful about how they show their confidence, their capabilities, and their tenacity, which poses real challenges to their professional lives. Cooperation rather than competition between women has been shown time and again to help women in national security career fields, including those associated with defense, development, and diplomacy. Unfortunately, for reasons including exhaustion, fear of negative career reprisals, and a biased system, cooperation often remains elusive.
A bright young Air Force veteran I worked with recently sent me a quote she had received from a friend on active duty. The quote is attributed to a recently pinned Colonel, and it both bothered and resonated with her. I had a similar reaction.
“I swam through a shark tank to achieve the success I have earned. I don’t have the capacity to open myself up to other women for mentorship. I have given up too much to be here.”
Understandably, women are sometimes worn down from years of negotiating their own career gauntlets. And make no mistake: when women reach the top of their careers and hold leadership positions, that does not exclude them from further scrutiny and criticism by male colleagues. From my own professional experience, I know that when women leaders try to help other women advance, assumptions and accusations of favoritism can quickly follow, damaging their own credibility.
I’ve written about the challenges that women in male-dominated, national security related fields face regarding sexual harassment and sexual assault, including a woman who told me she had felt “hunted” by her male colleagues at a forward operating base in Afghanistan. Women know that the chances of perpetrators being held responsible are low, while the chances of negative career blowback to themselves are high. So they say nothing, leaving them to carry the burdens of self-protection, harassment, and assault on their own. And while sexual harassment and assault are problems faced throughout society, few other segments of society profess honor, integrity, and respect as core values in the same way the military services do.
Women often try to become invisible, both for their self-protection and to avoid drawing the ire of their male colleagues. I asked a woman Navy pilot in one of my classes how she navigated her career path. “Honestly Ma’am,” she told me, “I just try to keep my head down and be one of the boys.” Perhaps being one of the boys is a safe path, but it can negate the value of diversity.
As a professional in the field of Women, Peace & Security (WPS), I often find myself having to explain that while WPS is a security-focused framework and not a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) program, there are elements of DEI in WPS because diversity brings demonstrable benefits to organizations. One of those benefits is increased “prudence” in decision-making, which Founding Father George Washington considered a key attribute of leadership. Prudence refers to judicious decision-making, where risks are taken fully into consideration, and success is often achieved by tempering individual and group egos.
Given that male leadership-associated characteristics often include assertiveness, decisiveness, and even bullishness, an overly active ego associated with those attributes – especially when propagated by a non-diverse group and has led to groupthink – can result in recklessness. Women’s leadership-associated attributes more often include emotional intelligence, humility, and self-awareness. As International Monetary Fund head Christine LeGarde has said about the 2018 financial crisis: “If it had been Lehman Sisters rather than Lehman Brothers, the world might well look a lot different today . . . [because] diversity also leads to more prudence, and less of the reckless decision-making that provoked the crisis.”
As women climb the professional ladder, however, displaying prudence and associated leadership characteristics often go unappreciated, and at times are even denigrated. A woman Naval officer I quoted in my WPS textbook illustrates this:
When I receive a task or request for information regarding a topic on which I do not consider myself an expert, my first reaction is to try to find someone who is better qualified to answer than I am, rather than venturing my own, ill-informed, and incomplete opinion. If I do feel that I am the most knowledgeable person on the subject, I don’t hesitate to answer confidently, even forcefully, if required. But I am much less willing than most of my male colleagues are to act like an expert when I’m not.
At the same time, she said, her superiors often encourage her to be more decisive and take initiative.
Unfortunately, women are not immune to adopting male leadership characteristics to get ahead. To be clear, ambition is not a negative attribute for either men or women. But just as too much ego can become toxic for men, so too it can for women. Overly ambitious women who turn on other women to get their points across to male leaders – this is what former Secretary of State Madeline Albright was referring to when she said, “there is a special place in Hell for women who don’t help other women.”
National security careers are not the only areas where women compete against one another. Indeed, women have been taught to compete for men who can play the role of protector and provider, in order to gain power advantages inside their own personal and professional circles. Sadly, this competition extends even to questions around motherhood: to be a mother or not, to stay at home and/or work while being a mother, even whether or not to breastfeed; and the decisions can come with judgement and shaming among women.
Men have learned the value of alliances to achieve goals. Women must do the same, proactively looking for opportunities to build alliances with other women as well as with men who act as allies. Ubiquitous opportunities range from the micro level – reinforcing ignored comments or suggestions made by women at meetings, as U.S. diplomat Wendy Sherman talked about in her 2018 book Not for the Faint of Heart – to the macro level, such as encouraging mentoring, which women lack more often than men, as well as requiring and rewarding mentoring in organizational performance reviews. Building alliances does not mean that women should put their own careers at risk by confronting every gender-based slight as a battle to be won. That would be both exhausting for them and turn them into organizational pariahs.
Perhaps first and foremost, women must not only recognize that competition amongst themselves exists, but that competition is a problem we ought to discuss widely and openly so we can begin to address it together. Only then can women expand their power base, advance their careers, and work together for the benefit of our collective national security efforts and of organizations as a whole.
Dr. Joan Johnson-Freese is currently a Senior Fellow at Women in International Security and an Adjunct Professor at Harvard Extension School. Prior to her engagement with the Women, Peace & Security (WPS) initiative, she held the position of University Professor and Chair of the National Security Affairs Department at the Naval War College (NWC) from 2002 to 2022. During her studies of space security, Dr. Johnson-Freese authored seven books and published over 100 articles. Dr. Johnson-Freese’s most recent books include Women, Peace & Security: An Introduction and Women v Women: The Case for Cooperation.