Appendix

Interviewees participated in their individual capacities, and their comments do not reflect the views of affiliated organizations. Not all chose to be named, but participants (in alphabetical order) included:

Alexandra Bell

M. Elaine Bunn

Susan Burk

Evelyn Farkas

Michèle Flournoy

Rose Gottemoeller

Rebecca Hersman

Kathleen Hicks

Laura Holgate

Bonnie Jenkins

Laura Kennedy

Jen Miller

Janne Nolan

Christine Parthemore

Deborah Rosenblum

Loren DeJonge Schulman

Julianne Smith

Mareena Robinson Snowden

Christine Wormuth

Andrea Yaffe

We interviewed 23 women who have worked in the nuclear security, arms control, and non-proliferation fields within the Departments of State, Energy, and Defense (military and civilian), the former Arms Control Disarmament Agency, and the White House. Interviewees had experience working in both Republican and Democratic administrations. They included retired practitioners, mid-career professionals, and senior title-holders; women whose experience ranges from the 1970s to present day. Some women are named in the report and in the appendix, others requested to remain anonymous.

The women were identified using a snowball sample method, where interviewees suggested other potential candidates, and the interviews were conducted in a structured format. We used content analysis methods to code the interview transcripts, and fact-checked all quotes before publishing.

Because of a limited sample and the lack of historical data, this study focused only on cis, or female-identifying, women. Though gender should not be equated with women, this study did not focus on men or gender non-conforming policymakers.

The data represented in the graphs were collected by two teams. The data analyzing how many women held senior positions within the Departments of State, Energy, and Defense, the former Arms Control Disarmament Agency, and the White House were collected based on United States Government Manuals, archived department websites, individual biographies, and departments’ historical records. For this study, “senior positions” includes assistant, under, deputy, and cabinet secretaries, and those who held the positions in an acting capacity. Within the White House, we only considered the National Security Advisor, as other titles fluctuate inconsistently across administrations. In the one case where we could not confirm the race of one female senior official, she was not included in the total number of women of color for her department. Because USG Manuals from 1961–1999 do not specify racial demographics for individual leaders, no such data were available for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA, since folded into the State Department).

Data for the percentage of women in delegations to the United Nations General Assembly First Committee (Disarmament and International Security) and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conferences come from the International Law and Policy Institute (ILPI) and United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR). Many thanks to the authors of the 2016 report “Gender, Development and Nuclear Weapons,” John Borrie, Anne Guro Dimmen, Torbjørn Graff Hugo, Camilla Waszink, and Kjølv Egeland, for sharing their data. The graphs in this study considered data from the five NPT nuclear states (the United States, Russia, France, China, and the United Kingdom), as well as former Soviet Union states that inherited nuclear weapons after the collapse of the Soviet Union (Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine), and states reflecting current nuclear threats (Iran and South Korea). Their methodology states:

When coding the participant lists, the number of men and women in each delegation was counted, and we also checked if the head of delegation was a man or a woman (determined by the prefix used (Mr or Ms)). In participant lists where several individuals were named as head of delegation (or “representative”), the person listed first is the one used. Note that the lists do not purport to reflect the actual presence of that person in the room at a given meeting, nor do they necessarily contain the names of all the individuals that attended. Some delegates may have participated without having been registered, and some states seem to routinely register more participants in the list than others (or do not register at all), a difference that is not necessarily visible in the meeting room.

Despite these data limitations, the lists of participants provide open and accessible sources for identifying patterns over time. While there may be some systematic imbalances in the observations (e.g., due to some states registering more consistently for meetings than others), there is little reason to believe that this tendency should be correlated with the gender balance variable, which would thus render the results invalid. In total, the dataset contains 15,366 unique observations (197 states and 26 meetings).