Back in the 1980s many in the FCO still recalled the days when a woman had to resign from the service on marriage – a fact which of course left only a tiny number of senior FCO women at the top of the British diplomatic world 20 years later.

That crass rule ended in the early 1970s, although it took a lot longer for the FCO to accept that pregnant officers should be allowed to carry on working at post – a prominent bump was not seen (by the mainly male top brass?) as altogether  ‘representational’.

I struck a blow for Equality back in the mid-1980s, when I served for a while as a member of the Diplomatic Service Association, the in-house staff association for career diplomats. They backed a woman colleague who had been denied a posting to an African Commonwealth country on the insistence of the High Commissioner running the Post concerned. He had argued that he already had an almost completely all-female Chancery team and that another woman might well open him and his mission to some unhelpful mirth/ridicule and so impair their local efficiency.

A very senior (male) diplomat on the DSA committee who should have known better argued grandly that obviously she had not been discriminated against – when the issue had come up she had been offered another posting equally as good.

I said that on the contrary this was an obvious case of discrimination – women had many senior public roles in the country concerned, and on evidently specious grounds she had been denied the full range of FCO postings available to a male officer. I offered to help the committee with my then still recent barrister training if she wanted to pursue the issue through the courts.  

The FCO management unerringly tended towards the wrong side of the argument but did refer the matter to the Government’s Law Officers for a view. It did not take them long to say that the FCO did not have a leg to stand on. By then the African posting job had been given to someone else.

These days such banal and overt gender discrimination would not happen, not least because the system is keenly attuned to the risk of flying writs (such as this new one). Plus attitudes have changed. This has been helped by bringing in almost total transparency in the internal appraisal and postings processes – back then officers were left largely in the dark as to what was being said and decided about them. Indeed, the case above emerged only because the postings officer mentioned the High Commissioner’s negative view to the officer concerned, who of course was more than annoyed.

So procedures and attitudes change. But it still takes time. In an established organisation like the FCO the gender and ‘ethnic’ profile of the top end of the organisation inevitably is to a degree some sort of living fossil record of attitudes and procedures up to 25 years earlier.

That may look ‘conservative’ or even ‘stuffy’ and ‘forbidding’. But it is a consequence of the positive fact that the FCO does pretty well at keeping key staff loyal and motivated for many years, a phenomenon which baffles many outsiders and insiders alike.