Her go-to seemed to be to keep her head down and do the work. "Sometimes we also need an iconoclast," she writes.įor someone who climbed to the highest ranks in the foreign service, she is also honest about the self-doubt that tagged along. But she's talking about it now, because sometimes persistence and hard work aren't enough. "I hadn't fully realized that 'merit' is a meaningless term if it's not judged on a level playing field." Given some of the comments that came her way about women in the foreign service, it's not surprising. "I wanted to succeed or fail on the merits, not because I was a woman benefitting from the lawsuit," she writes. Still, it's not something she talked about until now. Yovanovitch competed for one of the slots and got it. In a case of good timing, part of the settlement included allowing 14 female FSOs who had been placed in the management or consular cones to move to political. She sued the State Department for discrimination and won. Yovanovitch also benefitted from one woman in particular: Alison Palmer. It often entailed long hours, sometimes in dangerous situations. Luck finally intervened with a string of good bosses and some good job opportunities doing the political work she wanted. And, like many others who enter public service, she says she wanted to "find a way to give back to the country that had given the Yovanovitch family a home." (Her mother and father had both survived the Nazi occupation of Europe.) Still, she wanted to work in foreign affairs and to help represent and fight for American interests and values. She had some bad bosses, and in her first tour she literally had corruption (the nephew of the leader of the country) come knocking at her door. Instead of a political job, she was assigned to a management specialty. She didn't get the cone, State's term for job specialty, that she wanted. It was far from guaranteed that Yovanovitch would stay with State.
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