easures of women in diplomacy currently rely on a single metric: the percentage of women in state–appointed ambassadorial roles. According to the Women in Diplomacy Index, the global figure is 22.5%. This number matters because representation in formal institutions reflects power, access, and states' willingness to share authority. It should be tracked, and it should rise.
This metric may no longer tell the full story.
It was designed for a world in which international cooperation happened primarily through embassies, ministries, and formal state negotiations. That world still exists, but it has been extended beyond this into a world in which climate disruption, pandemics, displacement, and humanitarian crises are managed through coalitions of scientific institutions, civic networks, and cross–border partnerships that operate entirely outside foreign ministries. Diplomacy has evolved, but the frameworks used to measure women’s participation in it have not, widening the gap between what is measured and what is happening in the real world.
Numbers Missing in The Peace Gap
This contradiction is sharpest in peacebuilding. Formal statistics are sobering. Between 1992 and 2019, women made up only 13% of negotiators and 6% of signatories in major peace processes globally. By 2024, the share of women negotiators in formal conflict–resolution settings had fallen further, to just 7%. These figures represent a real failure of formal institutions, including and counting women at the table, and reveal only half the picture.
The first systematic study of women's involvement in informal peace processes, the civil society–led negotiations that run alongside, and often sustain, official talks, was conducted by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security. Of the 63 formal peace processes studied, 38 had parallel Track II processes, and nearly three–quarters of those showed clear evidence of active involvement by identifiable women’s groups.
The contrast is not just significant, it’s also structural. Women are doing much of the work that makes agreements possible, but are being excluded from the rooms where agreements are signed.
This is reinforced by the evidence provided in the following examples. In Liberia, women’s peace movements mobilized across religious and political divides to end civil conflict. In Northern Ireland, women’s coalitions helped bridge entrenched divisions during the Good Friday Agreement process. Across Sudan, Colombia, and dozens of local processes, women–led networks continue to mediate disputes and rebuild trust long after diplomats leave the room.
Mediation, trust–building, and negotiation across divided communities are core diplomatic functions, and the outcomes data are unambiguous. Peace agreements are 64% less likely to fail when civil society representatives participate. An analysis of 40 peace processes since the Cold War found that when women exercised strong influence, an agreement was almost always reached. Women are actively involved in diplomatic work; however, they are absent from the count.
What Goes Unnamed
International coordination increasingly depends on individuals operating entirely outside ministries of foreign affairs. This was demonstrated during the COVID–19 pandemic.
Women represented approximately 70% of the global health and social workforce during the pandemic, not as frontline caregivers but in coordination roles that connected institutions, communities, local governments, NGOs, and international agencies across borders.
This is increasingly being described by global health scholars as “health diplomacy.”
This is the ability and the skills required to manage threats that no single government can address alone. Vaccine access, pandemic preparedness, refugee health, and disease surveillance all require it.
Yet during COVID–19, 85% of the 115 national task forces convened globally were composed of more men than women, even as women were delivering the response. The coordination was women’s work. The recognition was not.
The same story is repeated on climate at a much larger scale. Women and girls are disproportionately affected by climate disruption, and women disproportionately lead local adaptation efforts, coordinating responses to food insecurity, water scarcity, disaster recovery, and displacement across local, national, and international actors.
According to UNDP, women–led community organizations often serve as the connective tissue between global climate commitments and local implementation. They are actively involved in mobilizing funding, knowledge, and action in contexts where formal diplomatic presence is limited or absent.
Coalition–building, cross–border coordination, and systems negotiation. These functions are diplomatic, but the title is not.
Why Measurement Matters
This discussion is not against formal representation. On the contrary. Increasing the number of women ambassadors, ministers, and negotiators remains essential, and at the current pace of progress, some countries will not reach equality in their diplomatic organizations for over a century. This demands pressure on formal institutions.
Measurement shapes visibility, and visibility shapes power. So what institutions measure determines what they recognize, fund, and legitimize. If diplomatic influence is measured only through formal appointments, entire domains of women’s leadership are rendered invisible. The work exists, but the definition of diplomacy excludes it. Diplomacy has evolved faster than the frameworks used to recognize participation in it.
Asking a Different Question
On an International Day dedicated to Women in Diplomacy, the question worth asking may be larger than representation alone.
The standard framing would pose the question: how do we get more women into diplomatic institutions? Nothing wrong with the question; indeed, it deserves better answers than the world has provided so far.
The question: What if women are not underrepresented in diplomacy, but diplomacy is underrepresented in how we measure women?
Consider what the indicators miss. In Sudan, women peacebuilders conducted shuttle diplomacy and constructed a shadow peace agreement that shaped the formal talks in Geneva, work that required cross–border negotiation, coalition management, and sustained political strategy.
In Côte d’Ivoire, women mediators de–escalated inter–community conflict in the Cavally region, producing a signed peace accord and, for the first time, becoming legally designated guarantors of its implementation.
In Syria, women advocates drove the establishment of an entirely new UN mechanism for missing persons.
None of these women held ambassadorial rank. None appear in the Women in Diplomacy Index. All of them changed outcomes. The women are already doing the work. Is the world willing to call it what it is?
It's not women who need the recognition. Diplomacy does.
a global affairs media network
We're measuring women's diplomacy wrong
Photo by André Eusébio on Unsplash.
June 24, 2026
Women lead informal peace, health, and climate diplomacy that formal metrics ignore, demanding new ways to measure their influence, writes Rabia Cozijn.
M
easures of women in diplomacy currently rely on a single metric: the percentage of women in state–appointed ambassadorial roles. According to the Women in Diplomacy Index, the global figure is 22.5%. This number matters because representation in formal institutions reflects power, access, and states' willingness to share authority. It should be tracked, and it should rise.
This metric may no longer tell the full story.
It was designed for a world in which international cooperation happened primarily through embassies, ministries, and formal state negotiations. That world still exists, but it has been extended beyond this into a world in which climate disruption, pandemics, displacement, and humanitarian crises are managed through coalitions of scientific institutions, civic networks, and cross–border partnerships that operate entirely outside foreign ministries. Diplomacy has evolved, but the frameworks used to measure women’s participation in it have not, widening the gap between what is measured and what is happening in the real world.
Numbers Missing in The Peace Gap
This contradiction is sharpest in peacebuilding. Formal statistics are sobering. Between 1992 and 2019, women made up only 13% of negotiators and 6% of signatories in major peace processes globally. By 2024, the share of women negotiators in formal conflict–resolution settings had fallen further, to just 7%. These figures represent a real failure of formal institutions, including and counting women at the table, and reveal only half the picture.
The first systematic study of women's involvement in informal peace processes, the civil society–led negotiations that run alongside, and often sustain, official talks, was conducted by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security. Of the 63 formal peace processes studied, 38 had parallel Track II processes, and nearly three–quarters of those showed clear evidence of active involvement by identifiable women’s groups.
The contrast is not just significant, it’s also structural. Women are doing much of the work that makes agreements possible, but are being excluded from the rooms where agreements are signed.
This is reinforced by the evidence provided in the following examples. In Liberia, women’s peace movements mobilized across religious and political divides to end civil conflict. In Northern Ireland, women’s coalitions helped bridge entrenched divisions during the Good Friday Agreement process. Across Sudan, Colombia, and dozens of local processes, women–led networks continue to mediate disputes and rebuild trust long after diplomats leave the room.
Mediation, trust–building, and negotiation across divided communities are core diplomatic functions, and the outcomes data are unambiguous. Peace agreements are 64% less likely to fail when civil society representatives participate. An analysis of 40 peace processes since the Cold War found that when women exercised strong influence, an agreement was almost always reached. Women are actively involved in diplomatic work; however, they are absent from the count.
What Goes Unnamed
International coordination increasingly depends on individuals operating entirely outside ministries of foreign affairs. This was demonstrated during the COVID–19 pandemic.
Women represented approximately 70% of the global health and social workforce during the pandemic, not as frontline caregivers but in coordination roles that connected institutions, communities, local governments, NGOs, and international agencies across borders.
This is increasingly being described by global health scholars as “health diplomacy.”
This is the ability and the skills required to manage threats that no single government can address alone. Vaccine access, pandemic preparedness, refugee health, and disease surveillance all require it.
Yet during COVID–19, 85% of the 115 national task forces convened globally were composed of more men than women, even as women were delivering the response. The coordination was women’s work. The recognition was not.
The same story is repeated on climate at a much larger scale. Women and girls are disproportionately affected by climate disruption, and women disproportionately lead local adaptation efforts, coordinating responses to food insecurity, water scarcity, disaster recovery, and displacement across local, national, and international actors.
According to UNDP, women–led community organizations often serve as the connective tissue between global climate commitments and local implementation. They are actively involved in mobilizing funding, knowledge, and action in contexts where formal diplomatic presence is limited or absent.
Coalition–building, cross–border coordination, and systems negotiation. These functions are diplomatic, but the title is not.
Why Measurement Matters
This discussion is not against formal representation. On the contrary. Increasing the number of women ambassadors, ministers, and negotiators remains essential, and at the current pace of progress, some countries will not reach equality in their diplomatic organizations for over a century. This demands pressure on formal institutions.
Measurement shapes visibility, and visibility shapes power. So what institutions measure determines what they recognize, fund, and legitimize. If diplomatic influence is measured only through formal appointments, entire domains of women’s leadership are rendered invisible. The work exists, but the definition of diplomacy excludes it. Diplomacy has evolved faster than the frameworks used to recognize participation in it.
Asking a Different Question
On an International Day dedicated to Women in Diplomacy, the question worth asking may be larger than representation alone.
The standard framing would pose the question: how do we get more women into diplomatic institutions? Nothing wrong with the question; indeed, it deserves better answers than the world has provided so far.
The question: What if women are not underrepresented in diplomacy, but diplomacy is underrepresented in how we measure women?
Consider what the indicators miss. In Sudan, women peacebuilders conducted shuttle diplomacy and constructed a shadow peace agreement that shaped the formal talks in Geneva, work that required cross–border negotiation, coalition management, and sustained political strategy.
In Côte d’Ivoire, women mediators de–escalated inter–community conflict in the Cavally region, producing a signed peace accord and, for the first time, becoming legally designated guarantors of its implementation.
In Syria, women advocates drove the establishment of an entirely new UN mechanism for missing persons.
None of these women held ambassadorial rank. None appear in the Women in Diplomacy Index. All of them changed outcomes. The women are already doing the work. Is the world willing to call it what it is?
It's not women who need the recognition. Diplomacy does.
