Canadian Foreign Policy: Does gender matter?
The Department of Foreign Affairs has had a longstanding commitment to advance gender equality and women's human rights. This article looks first at the challenges facing women within the foreign affairs bureaucracy, and then examines Canada's support and encouragement of gender mainstreaming initiatives internationally. In comparing the Canadian commitment to gender mainstreaming abroad with its attempts to integrate women into the foreign policy establishment at home, the article points to some of the limits of the current efforts to include women and gender in foreign policy processes and policies. It suggests that these processes and policies cannot respond meaningfully to concerns about the place of women and gender in foreign policy, without first understanding the extent to which they reflect profoundly gendered premises about the nature of foreign service, on the one hand, and the structure of global order, on the other.