No longer so male and stale

AT THE end of every summer, the French diplomatic service summons all its ambassadors from around the world to Paris for a week of brainstorming and fine cuisine. Usually, the assembled crowd is monochrome, middle-aged and male. This year, however, it was marked by a shock of silk scarves and coloured jackets: nearly a third of the ambassadorial corps was made up of women, compared to 19% in Britain and 26% in America.

Little-noticed outside the foreign-policy world, France has transformed the place of female diplomats. Currently 48 of its ambassadors are women, a record; and women won 29% of all new ambassadorial appointments last year, up from 11% in 2012. “We’ve now achieved a critical mass,” says one of them. “Our presence has gone from remarkable to commonplace.”

This has not happened without an official push, and decades of frustration for some. A few years ago, a nominations committee queried whether one female candidate had “broad enough shoulders” for a senior foreign post (she still got it). But in 2012 France decided to reserve a share of top public-service appointments for women, with a target of 40% by 2018.

The foreign ministry could have notched up the numbers by simply sending women to remote islands and kingdoms. Instead, their ambassadorial postings now include some of the most prestigious (Sylvie Bermann in London; Catherine Colonna in Rome), as well as strategic (Isabelle Dumont in Ukraine; Martine Dorance in Pakistan). Ms Bermann, a fluent Mandarin-speaker, was previously ambassador to Beijing.

Does a female ambassador change anything? Besides the pressing linguistic question of whether to call her Madame l’Ambassadrice (favoured by some younger diplomats) or Madame l’Ambassadeur (Ms Bermann’s preference, to avoid being taken for an ambassador’s wife), the answer may be: not all that much. “Authority has nothing to do with being a man or a woman,” declares one female ambassador.

Perhaps most importantly, a less male representation projects a less fusty national image at a time when “soft” power counts for ever more. Indeed, feminisation seems to be part of a broader French effort to “renew our global diplomacy for the 21st century”, in the words of Laurent Fabius, the foreign minister, whose predecessor but one was a woman, Michèle Alliot-Marie.