Organisational Resistance to Women’s Intrusiveness. A Comparative Study of the Appointment of Female Ambassadors in the USA, United Kingdom, Denmark, and Sweden.

The purpose of this study is to test an assumption related to the critical mass theory, namely that women’s empowerment is linearly related to their share of the workforce. The idea is that when the share of women has reached a certain level, they will experience less resistance. It has been pointed out, however, that the resistance from the environment does not necessarily decrease linearly to the share of women. On the contrary, there are reasons to believe that the resistance may in fact increase when women start entering an organisation in greater numbers. This kind of sudden change may be perceived as intrusive and threatening and therefore create a counter reaction from the dominant group. We will test this claim in a comparative study of the share female ambassadors appointed by four different countries. Today, women make up 15% of the richest countries’ ambassadors, but they are less likely to be placed at high status postings. We interpret this pattern as a kind of resistance from the MFAs to women’s intrusiveness and aspirations to pursue diplomatic careers. The question is how this resistance changes in relation to the share of women in the MFAs, particularly at ambassador positions. The countries compared are primarily chosen based on their share of female ambassadors and cultural contexts. The USA and the UK are both Anglo-Saxon countries, but the USA appoints 30% female ambassadors, the UK 17. Similarly, Sweden and Denmark are both Nordic countries, but Sweden appoints 40% female ambassadors and Denmark only 22. Data will be collected for each of these countries from the 1970s until today. In that way, we will be able to analyse how the organisational resistance changes as the level of female intrusiveness varies over time within the same context, as well as between different contexts.