Ambassador Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, a 30-year diplomat, is the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer for the Department of State.
She left the foreign service during the Trump administration because she was disillusioned with its direction.“It has always been a struggle for minorities and women to reach our full potential in the white-male-dominated world of diplomacy,” she wrote of her decision in The New York Times. “The State Department has long struggled to reflect ‘looking like America’ among our senior officer corps, and under this president the refusal to utilize the talent, experience and passion of so many people dedicated to serving our nation was heartbreaking.”
“I have often argued that we are not inherently better at the job, but that we are prepared. Because as women, as minorities in this country, we have always started in a position of not being in power,” Abercrombie-Winstanley told Rama Yade, the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center (and a trailblazing Black diplomat in her own right in France). “We have to make friends. We have to be able to convince people to support our positions. Those basic qualities, frankly, make for better diplomacy.”She noted that while lower and mid-level positions are often more diverse than they have been in the past, it’s a different story for senior-level posts. “Our workforce notices the extreme lack of diversity in our senior positions—whether it is parity or diversity—and that the process of getting to these positions is very opaque.”While she laid out the monetary and moral case for diversity and inclusion initiatives, Abercrombie-Winstanley compared her diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility reforms to taking action on cybersecurity: “We may not love it, but we do it. So I don’t mind what’s in your heart, what’s in your head—it’s what you do.”
She argues that having women and minorities in top diplomatic posts is more important than ever in a time when being the world’s “8,000 pound gorilla” isn’t enough for the United States to secure cooperation from other nations.
Because we’re operating in a diverse world, and America’s diversity is a source of strength that few countries can match, when we fail to build a team that reflects America, it’s like we’re engaging the world with one arm tied behind our back.And as President Biden has made clear, prioritizing diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility is also a national security imperative.We’ve got our work cut out for us.The State Department simply isn’t as diverse and inclusive as it needs to be.
Today, we’re taking an important step in that direction by naming Ambassador Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley as our chief diversity and inclusion officer – the first in the department’s history.I couldn’t be happier about having Gina join our team.The CDIO will report directly to me.She’ll be empowered to develop a robust framework for fostering diversity and inclusion in our workforce.She’ll also be entrusted with aligning and advancing diversity and inclusion efforts across the department.And she’ll do it transparently, in a way that holds all of us accountable – including senior leadership, including me – which hasn’t happened in the past.
She also is co-author of two papers published in the New York Review of Science Fiction on “Diplomacy in Star Trek” and “The Representation of Disability in Star Trek,” and says she continues to follow those issues “with all the new iterations of Star Trek.”