Executive Summary

This study tells the stories of nearly two dozen women with decades of experience in nuclear, arms control, and non-proliferation policy. They have much to teach us, not just about the history of the field but about its future—how to keep it thriving, fill it with vital and innovative talent, and connect it with the best thinking about security, from which it has been too often cut off.

In short, the story of gender diversity in nuclear security is the story of how the field improves and innovates—or fails to do so.

While women have been working in the field at leadership levels for decades, this policy space is still overwhelmingly white and male. For this study, we interviewed 23 women who have worked in the nuclear, arms control, and non-proliferation fields, their careers ranging from the 1970s to the present day. These women have held positions in the Departments of State, Energy, and Defense, the former Arms Control Disarmament Agency, and within the White House, for both Republican and Democratic administrations. They have represented the United States both at home and in international delegations across the globe.

To contextualize these conversations, we considered the history of the nuclear, arms control, and non-proliferation fields; tracked how many women held senior positions in the U.S. government since the 1970s, as well as how many women were included in key American nuclear delegations; and analyzed how those numbers compared to international counterparts.

In Part 1 of this report, we explore the cultures of different nuclear subfields—the gender dynamics surrounding hierarchy, language, and ideology, and explore how women working in these fields responded personally and professionally. We consider how women enter the field and move through it, including what keeps them in and what pushes them out. In Part 2, we document and analyze the “gender tax” facing women in nuclear policy—how experiences of sexism, harassment, and gendered expectations translate into constant mental and emotional weight. We explore how these dynamics affected women and the strategies they adopted to push back. In Part 3, we consider how gender diversity affects policymaking, the ways that some of the more hyper-traditional subfields respond to new ideas, creating what former Under Secretary of Defense Michèle Flournoy calls a “consensual straitjacket” in which these gender and substantive taxes combine to restrict innovation. Finally, Part 4 addresses approaches to increasing both women’s participation and the diversity of intellectual approaches in the field as a mechanism to boost overall innovation and effective outcomes in nuclear security, arms control, and non-proliferation.