Gallery: AU Hosts Women Ambassadors to the US...
(from left to right) Ambassadors Floreta Faber of Albania, Vlora Çitaku of Kosovo, Kirsti Kauppi of Finland, Claudia Ivette Canjura de Contento of El Salvador, Karin Olofsdotter of Sweden, and Rosemary Bank of New Zealand discuss women in diplomacy.
AU Hosts Women Ambassadors to the US in Honor of International Women's Day
Article by Michael Karlis
Photos by Mitchell Lenneville
The ambassadors to the US from Albania, Kosovo, Finland, El Salvador, Sweden, and New Zealand, all of whom women, discussed the role of women in diplomacy and the challenges they face, with Betsy Fischer Martin, the Executive of Director of the Women and Politics Institute (WPI) on March 6th at the Katzen Art Center.
The event was co-sponsored by the WPI, the Kennedy Political, Union, the School of Public Affairs, and AU’s foreign service fraternity Delta Phi Epsilon.
Martin asked the ambassador to introduce themselves and explain how the ambassadors arrived at their current positions.
“It is true for me and my generation that becoming politically active was not a choice; it was a way of survival,” said Vlora Çitaku, the ambassador of Kosovo. “When you grow up under oppression, when you see your school teacher beaten up in front of you, when you see your parents lose their jobs because they are Albanian, when you see the world falling apart, you can’t really dream of becoming anything but free,” said Çitaku.
Çitaku is discussing her upbringing during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, which led to the birth of Kosovo.
Çitaku said that the benefit of Kosovo being such a young democracy is that she has been able to help shape the countries constitution, including a requirement that 30% of Kosovo’s parliament be women, and amending the constitution's clause that had used the phrase “first lady.”
Kirsti Kauppi, the Ambassador of Finland, discussed her country's long history of women in politics but admitted that there is always room for improvement.
“In 1906 we [Finland] had 200 members in the parliament, and we elected 19 women,” Kauppi said. “In 1916 we elected 25 women to parliament. Today a little over 40% of members of parliament are women.”
Kauppi said that although almost half of Finland's parliament is women, only about 35% of the countries ministers are women, which led to criticism from the public.
“I expect the next government certainly to have a more even [gender] distribution,” Kauppi said.
Rosemary Banks, the ambassador of New Zealand, discussed how her countries current prime minister, and third woman to hold that office, Jacinda Ardern, recently gave birth to a child while in office.
“We [New Zealand] were the first self-governing country to give women the right to vote in parliamentary elections in 1893,” Bank said. “But, we weren't able to actually elect women to parliament until 1919.”
Banks continued to explain New Zealand's history of women in government and said that it wasn’t until 1933 when a woman was elected to parliament, and their first woman cabinet minister was selected until 1947. Banks also noted that in New Zealand's parliament today, there is a higher percentage of minority women mp’s than white European women, which Banks contributed to a recent focus in the country on diversity.
AMIRS extends a special thanks to Ambassadors Floreta Faber of Albania, Vlora Çitaku of Kosovo, Kristi Kauppi of Finland, Claudia Ivette Canjura de Contento of El Salvador, Karin Olofsdotter of Sweden, and Rosemary Banks of New Zealand for their time.
