Gender and intelligence

It also came from you the students deciding to undertake the idea of gender and intelligence for group projects. This is appropriate as feminist pedagogy – critique of university teaching by examining the relationships of power in the ways that we teach – proposes the democratisation of teaching and advances the idea that teachers learn from their students just as much as students learn from teachers.

I am aware that today’s approach – the idea that we can cover the question of gender in one lecture, sometimes referred to within the literature as the ‘add women and stir’ approach – is already one that has been criticised within the field of gender studies. Of course, gender is something that pervades our interaction as human beings to such an extent that to try and cover it in one lecture might seem a little inadequate. But we all have to start somewhere. 

A lecture where images are particularly important, as we are often talking about appearance, clothes, visibility and invisibility, here are two images to start – both of which we will discuss later.

What is gender? And more particularly, what is the difference between gender and sex?  If sex is the biological difference between male and female, then gender is a way to describe the collection of social and cultural differences between the two. This idea is not new.

De Beauvoir suggests that we are not born with the traits that are perceived as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ – such as rationality, decisiveness, or warmth, or being emotionally expressive – we learn them.  But clearly academic debate and research and our general experience of gender has moved on a great deal since de Beauvoir’s seminal work of 1949. 

For the purposes of this lecture, we will be using the UN definition of gender, which is a widely accepted definition of the term, as follows:

‘Gender: refers to the social attributes and opportunities associated with being male and female and the relationships between women and men and girls and boys, as well as the relations between women and those between men. These attributes, opportunities and relationships are socially constructed and are learned through socialization processes. They are context/time-specific and changeable. Gender determines what is expected, allowed and valued in a woman or a man in a given context. In most societies there are differences and inequalities between women and men in responsibilities assigned, activities undertaken, access to and control over resources, as well as decision-making opportunities. Gender is part of the broader socio-cultural context. Other important criteria for socio-cultural analysis include class, race, poverty level, ethnic group and age.’

As the last sentence suggests, gender is but one aspect of the landscape of inequality, and the experiences of all women are obviously far from identical. For example, the challenges faced by a straight, white, middle-class woman in France are going to be very different from those faced by a gay, Arab, lower-class woman in Jordan. 

To summarise, gender is:

• socially constructed as opposed to something we are born with. 

• related to what is expected/allowed/valued in men and women

• *one of a number of criteria for social analysis.

When we look at popular interpretations of intelligence and espionage, notions of gender are inescapable.

From James Bond, the original action spy: violent, womanising, cold; to the men like George Smiley who inhabit the world of the novels of John le Carre, – so different from James Bond but nevertheless very gendered: emotionally dysfunctional, yet a meticulous master of spycraft. As to the portrayal of women – where to start? The submissive Miss Moneypenny of the Bond films, always in contrast with the ‘Bond girls’ – women who are defined by their beauty and sooner or later their sexual availability to Bond. From Nikita to Homeland’s Carrie Mathison, the appearance of the women is a huge part of their story as a spy. Until the recent series ‘Killing Eve’ I think it is impossible to see an onscreen portrayal of a woman where her appearance is not the whole story. For Sandra Oh’s character, appearance and clothes were an important part of the story but addressed in a more sophisticated way. 

What are gender studies? Gender studies is a recent development in academic terms – it has developed in the last 40 years, which coincidentally is approximately the same timeframe as Intelligence Studies. Although it shares very little with Intelligence Studies in subject matter, in a way the two disciplines perhaps share their roots in the more general shifts that took place in society in the 20^thcentury: the changing role of women and the increasing transparency of government, which overlap somewhat.  

Of course, Gender Studies does not exclusively examine the feminine aspects of gender, but also shines a light on what it is to be masculine, and what masculinity means, which is useful for us in the discipline of Intelligence Studies, when so much of the popular image of those who work in intelligence is dominated by notions of traditional masculinity.

Another significant development more recently is the growing visibility of transgender lives – which also has a continuing impact on the way that we think about gender. The other key concept often used in feminist scholarship is ‘patriarchy’ – a term which refers to the ‘structure and ideological system that perpetuates the privileging of masculinity’.^[6]

As I mentioned, the field of gender studies examines what it means to be a woman and a man. While there is a lot of important research being done on masculinity because of time constraints we will today be mainly focussing on the experiences of women. 

Gender and Security Studies

When academics approach the subject of gender and intelligence, they tend to do it in two ways. The first is to write the histories of female spies – this is by far the most common method of investigating this area. The second is to use theoretical approaches from the world of gender studies to critique the existing literature on intelligence. This approach is rare in intelligence, although it was been used more effectively in the more general field of security studies, where gender is often used as a tool to examine the broader question of social inequality and the impact that this has on issues connected to security.  

Feminist authors in the field of security studies have used the concept of gender to understand the ways in which people of all genders understand ‘how their own predicament fits into broader structures of violence and oppression’. According to one recent book on gender and security, feminist scholars have used gender to the challenge ‘statist versions of security that treat the survival of and well being of institutions as more important then the survival and well being of individuals’. They also employ gender to break down the ways in which different groups are affected by war and conflict, especially those who are marginalised and disempowered. 

However, these feminist scholars are also wary of simplistic stereotypes, such as the idea of aggressive men and peaceful women. Recent scholarship on, for example, gender and extremism challenges the idea that female extremists are either radical feminists or weak victims and explodes the myth that jihadi women do not engage in combat.

Using gender as a tool to critique existing ideas in security studies has been a fruitful route of scholarly enquiry, and the model is one that could be usefully applied to a wider range of issues in Intelligence Studies.

Let’s begin by looking at what we know about women in the field of intelligence. 

Women spies in history

Until very recently, the general perception within the intelligence studies literature on women spies was that they were a rare species; usually extraordinary exceptions to the generally male-dominated world of espionage. However, just as the role of women throughout history is being re-evaluated, so the time has come to reassess the role of women in intelligence studies. 

The 17^th century

It has often been pointed out that as a woman Elizabeth I, the monarch at the beginning of this century, did little to enhance the general lives of her female subjects during her rule and this may be true. However, Elizabeth was perhaps a trailblazer in other ways, particularly when it came to intelligence. In fact we could think of her as the first female head of ‘British intelligence’. However, Elizabeth was perhaps a trailblazer in other ways, particularly when it came to intelligence. In fact we could think of her as the first female head of ‘British intelligence’. What might be even more surprising is that this intelligence network used a surprisingly high number of women spies. Of course, there was no intelligence organisation during this period in the way that we know it today. But this was an age when intelligence was crucial for domestic security and the formation of all of the new European states, and Elizabeth ran a well-organised, centralised intelligence operation

So who made up the network of spies working for Elizabeth? The picture is perhaps a counter-intuitive one: the world of espionage in this era was busy with women spies. Women from all walks of life were working both formally and informally as spies, and taking on all manner of intelligence activity, from crossing enemy lines to helping to devise devious schemes. They used traditionally feminine materials such as needlework to convey subversive messages but their letters also show that they were involved in military matters. It seems that women worked as spies not because of any sort of progressive attitude to them as women, but because they got the job done. 

In a recent book, Invisible Agents, Nadine Akkerman asks why these women have been hidden from our view for so long. As we know, investigations of all kinds of matters of intelligence are often tricky because of the amount of information that is withheld by the intelligence organisations. For women working as spies in the 17^th century, these problems are magnified even further. Akkerman suggests that these women have been ‘obliterated from the archival record’. After all, this was a century in which women in Europe were invisible socially, financially and sexually, whether they were spies or not.^[14] Akkerman argues that as with their male counterparts, it was the job of female spies to be invisible – if they were successful at this, then by default they were written out of history. Where they do appear in the historical record is often in the archive of what Akkerman describes as the ‘authoritative other’ – that is the archives of those who interrogated or persecuted these women, or who intercepted their letters. 

In these early years of espionage, long before there were established intelligence institutions, when all espionage was conducted in a more loose and ad hoc mannager, women of all kinds became spies: ‘postmistresses to playwrights, low life fraudsters to nurses, laundry women to ladies-in-waiting’.

Notions of gender roles were already central at this point to women’s involvement in spying. One reason why women who were employed as spies was because at that time the general view was that women were ‘less capable of rational thought’ than men, and therefore women were beyond suspicion. 

For other women, their ‘sexual availability’ was another central aspect of their profession as a spy. For example, Lady Carlisle, on whom the character of Milady de Winter was based in the book The Three Musketeers, was renowned for her great beauty and exploited her sexual attraction for her espionage purposes.

The work of a female spy often seems to have involved accessing spaces that would not have been available to them had they been a man. The case of Charles I is a good example here. Charles became king of England in 1625, but conflict between Charles and parliament lead to the outbreak of civil war and the eventual victory of Oliver Cromwell.

Charles was executed in 1649, but during his imprisonment, several women became ‘vital’ to him as a network of intelligence. These women were mainly nobility, and began by simply ‘passing secret messages to and fro’ however, they went on to form an ‘underground correspondence network’. Akkerman describes how these women’s roles ‘evolved slowly as they were transformed from being mere couriers into intelligence agents who not only carried messages but also wrote them’.^[16]

These women ranged from ‘glamorous and publicly visible women’ such as Lady d’Aubigny, Lady Carlisle and Lady Thynne to those closer to the king’s domestic situation like the head of the royal laundry and the king’s own mistress Jane Whorwood. Lady d’Aubigny carried Charles’s secret instructions for a Royalist uprising into London carried in the locks of her hair. Lady d’Aubigny was also one of a number of ‘adventurous Women’ who carried secret documents between London and Oxford (a dangerous route because it served as the King’s base during the civil war) sewn into the covers of books.

So here the Dorothy’s gender plays a two-fold role – first she is granted the right to travel as a women who is less suspicious, and then when she is found with intelligence from the king she is able to wriggle free as a noble woman who is not responsible for something that her servants have planted in her luggage – the coda being that of course the king is not going to get off anywhere near so lightly.

Other aspects of gender also notable in these accounts of women as ‘intelligencers’. For example, it’s clear that for many of these women the relative ease with which they could move between public and private spaces also meant that they were often seen as morally suspicious. As one scholar put it: ‘… because the trade in knowledge was associated with the trade in sex, informing by women could carry a sexualised stigma.’^[ Similarly for other elite women, their marital status was key to their work as a spy as it was often the death of a husband that caused her to take over her husband’s work and connections. 

The 20^th and 21^st centuries

How do spies in more recent decades compare to their 17^th century counterparts? There are both interesting similarities and differences. A major difference is that we see the role of women more broadly changing and changing radically, and this of course permeates the lives of women working as spies, the roles that are open to them, and the ways that we perceive them. But just as in the 17^th century, themes of invisibility and sexuality, of physical beauty are also very much a part of the story. 

To begin with the spy that everyone has heard of, and who is perhaps responsible for many of the stereotypes is Margaretha Zelle, known as Mata Hari, who ticks all the boxes – she was apparently a German spy, and as such she was executed by the French in 1917, when she was only 41. She was reputed to have refused a blindfold at her execution, and instead smiled at the firing squad. She was an exotic dancer, a courtesan, with a personal life that was chaotic and tragic, and whose story is still cloaked in mystery. Most importantly, it doesn’t seem that she really did much in the way of passing actual useful intelligence. There have been many books about her – all sensational in nature. I’d suggest that it is most useful to put her example to one side if we really want to understand what it like to be spy for the majority of women in the 20th century

Another famous woman who worked as a spy in WW2 is Christine Granville. Granville was born in Poland, and arrived in Britain just as WW2 began, determined to help the nation of her birth by working for British intelligence.

She literally found a contact in the SIS and arrived with a fully-formed plan to take British propaganda into Nazi-occupied Poland by skiing from Hungary over the Carpathian Mountains. Granville was recruited to the Special Operations Executive or SOE more or less immediately, and did indeed carry out her plan to carry British propaganda into Poland over the mountains. The conditions were terrible: the temperature reached minus 30 that winter, the snow on the mountains lay four metres deep, ice formed on the clothes of Granville as she climbed, and there was the ever-present threat of German soldiers. On reaching Warsaw, she handed over the propaganda that she was carrying to reproduced in the underground press. She then went on to collect various pieces of intelligence to take back to the UK, including assessing the impact of British leaflet drops over Poland, which she judged as ‘magnificent’. She went on to ‘devise a new scheme for broadcasting special news bulletins at a fixed time and on a fixed wavelength, to be picked up by ordinary radio sets in Poland’.

Granville also conforms to this stereotype of beautiful and bold, and despite the unarguable bravery of her actions, her biographer spends so much time writing about this aspect of her life, her appearance, her lovers and so on. 

Other well-known examples of well-known female spies in the UK over the last century are the women who worked on the effort to crack the Enigma code at Bletchley Park. Of the 10,000 people who worked at Bletchley during the war, an astonishing 75 per cent were women. Again it is hard to find exact statistics, but it does seem that women tended to work more in administrative roles and less in senior roles as cryptanalysts at the level of say, Alan Turing. It seems that as the codebreaking process and the volume of intercepts grew, more women were recruited to deal with them, many from the WRNS, the ATS and the WAAF. 

However, we know that women did work as cryptanalysts, for example Margaret Rock, who was a graduate mathematician and statistician. She began work at Bletchley in 1940, where she worked as part of an all-female team to break the German Military Intelligence Enigma Machine in the winter of 1941. This allowed Britain to control the German spy network in Britain and feed misinformation to Hitler about where Britain would attack on D-Day. Rock continued to work at Bletchley, and then at GCHQ, as a codebreaker for the next 20 years. 

She was the same generation as the Cambridge Five and motivated by similar experiences such as witnessing the mass unemployment of the 1930s. The intelligence that Norwood passed to the KGB hastened the development of the Soviet nuclear weapons programme. In many ways, her significance as a spy is equal to Kim Philby and the others.

All these examples of women spies, no matter whether they might be glamourous or desk-bound, young or old, still feel exceptional, their stories are all remarkable in some way, and it is hard to know how representative they are. Nor do they give us a sense of the number of women actually working in the field of intelligence. But some agencies, such as the CIA, have started to analyse the data in a more systematic way. In 2013, the CIA released a large number of documents which shed light on the number of women who have worked for the organisation since 1947, and the type of roles that they have performed in that time. 

The report notes that the CIA came into being during a time of great social change in the US, with women taking on professional roles during war-time that had previously not been open to them. Nevertheless, although the women who worked for the direct predecessor of the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services, made up a relatively healthy 35 per cent of the workforce there, the roles that they were allowed to take on often worked on the more administrative side: filing secret reports, answering telephones, keeping records, and encoding and decoding messages. However, some women did take on less traditional roles: cryptanalysts, overseas unit contacts and spies. 

Her work for the OSS was varied: she typed up the names of thousands of names of officers on index cards in order to keep track of each individual officer. But she also helped develop shark repellent – a critical tool during the war for coating the explosives that were meant for German U-boats. She also worked overseas in Sri Lanka – Ceylon as it was then – handling highly classified papers that dealt with the invasion of the Malay peninsula.

The end of WW2 arrived, and the landscape shifted once again. By 1953, the CIA’s new chief Allen Dulles undertook an investigation into the role of women within his organisation. This investigation showed that in 1953 around 40 per cent of the CIA workforce were women, higher than the national rate of the US workforce. Women employed by the CIA were also paid more than the average wage for a woman in that year. However, most women were employed within the organisation’s lower grades and women were generally paid less than men doing the same jobs. Furthermore, women were much more likely to be employed on the administrative side and only made up 28 per cent of field employees.

As a side note, the record of the FBI was far worse. When J. Edgar Hoover became head of the FBi in the 1920s there were three women serving as special agents in the bureau, and Hoover demanded the resignation of two of them within his first month in the post. The third resigned four years later, and from that moment on there were no women special agents in the FBI until Hoover’s resignation in the 1970s. NONE! And if that isn’t a fascinating starting point for a comparison between those two organisations, then I don’t know what is. It took two women employees filing a discrimination lawsuit to persuade the FBI to begin appointing female agents once again.

So – then along comes the 1960s. In America, and here in the UK, this brought legislation that started to guarantee equality in the work place for women. In the CIA, just as in the rest of the world, real change was much slower. Through the 1970s, the organisation’s internal reports show that while overall attitudes within the CIA towards women employees were positive, recruitment of women for the Clandestine Service was way below recruitment in other areas of the organisation. The report suggested that: ‘there has apparently been some resistance by the CS to accept many women on the theory, real or fancied, that they are limited in their operational potential’.

In the late 1970s, one woman gave an example of what this underestimation of women’s ‘operational potential’ looked like in practice, when she described her interview for a job at the agency in the 1960s. Although she was a college graduate who could fly a plane and speak Mandarin, she reported that her interviewer at the time merely wanted to know: ‘Can you type?’

Despite the legal changes that had been made to the status of working women, as the decades passed little real difference had been to the patterns of women’s work within the organisation – women made up 40 per cent of the overall workforce, but only 10 per cent of its most senior ranks. A report written in the early 1990s made a series of recommendations to reform the situation, which seem to have had some impact. 

Through the 1990s, the number of women at the CIA exceeded 40 per cent, and by 2000, 44 per cent of employees were women. By 2002, just over 20 per cent of senior positions within the organisation were held by women. In 2012, overall employment of women was at 46 per cent and at senior level was up to 31 per cent.

Last week, it was reported that the three top positions at the CIA are now held by women – the director is Gina Haspel, Cynthia Rapp is deputy director for analysis and Elizabeth Kimber is the deputy director for operations. Dawn Meyerriecks is the deputy director from science and technology. The number of women at the CIA is now reckoned to be nearing 50 per cent.

In the UK, MI5 has had two women directors, Stella Rimington the first taking up her post in 1992, and Eliza Manningham-Buller the second. A report published in the summer of 2018 by the Intelligence and Security Committee on diversity and inclusion within the UK intelligence community took stock of the role of women. The report began with a reminder about why it is important to be mindful of the gender balance in these organisations: ‘Diversity is about a lot more than ticking boxes and meeting targets…This is not just an ethical issue: it is vitally important from an intelligence perspective … Logically, if all intelligence professionals are cut from the same cloth, then they are likely to share ‘unacknowledged biases’ that circumscribe both the definition of problems and the search for solutions. Diversity should therefore be pursued not just on legal or ethical grounds – which are important in themselves – but because it will result in a better response to the range of threats that we face to our national security.’

Data collected from across the UK intelligence community in 2016-17 makes an interesting comparison with rates from their US counterparts. The number of women employed by SIS, MI5 and GCHQ is between 35.2 per cent and 42.2 per cent. Again for women in more senior positions, this is between 24 and 31 per cent. 

The report quotes an SIS recruitment officer: ‘This is my second stint in the Recruitment team after I was here ten years ago. In my first stint in recruitment we used to ask ourselves ‘would they fit in?’. Looking back, we were probably asking whether applicants were like ‘us’. In hindsight, we were contributing to ‘group think’, which is dangerous when an organisation needs to be challenged and have different opinions aired… In 2017, talent-spotting looks very different. We’re just as likely to seek potential candidates in Coventry or Leeds as in Oxbridge.’

The report notes that progress has been made within the intel organisations including: workshops to support women returning from maternity leave, events for colleagues to learn more about shared parental leave, and to access career advice from senior role models serving both overseas and in the UK. The report also makes plenty of recommendations about the future, especially of ensuring a greater number of women in leadership roles, suggesting that senior leaders to actively seek out information on who and where the talent is when it comes to under-represented groups in their organisation, and to ensure that they are being given appropriate career management and support; as well as using the concept of ‘reverse mentoring’ – a process in which senior leaders and Executive Board members should undertake reverse mentoring with individuals from underrepresented groups within their organisation, to better understand their unique challenges as well as the positive impacts of diversity. 

A feminist critique of intelligence studies

But! All these numbers will seem like a paragon of equality when we come on to compare them with the numbers of women writing and researching in the field of intelligence studies. 

For here, among a group of people who regularly write about the dangers of groupthink, the representation of women is a fraction of that found in the US and UK intelligence organisations. Although it is hard to find data about how many women are actually working in the field in the UK, we do have data on how many female academics have contributed to journals on intelligence in recent decades. 

 A survey of the two main journals of intelligence, Intelligence and National Security (INS) and International Journal and Intelligence and Counterintelligence (IJIC), shows that overall the number of women who have published articles in those journals between 1986 and 2015 is just 9.1 per cent. The trend has increased over those years – albeit very slowly – and since 1993 every journal has had at least one contribution from a woman author or co-author.^[29]

If we think about academic journals as one of the main ways that academics talk to each other, it is clear to see that female academics are marginalised in this conversation.

Not only this but the editorial boards of IJIC and INS are currently composed of a vast majority of male experts (86 males and nine females). In 2016, the Intelligence Studies Section (ISS) of the International Studies Association, one of the main hubs for intelligence scholars, counted 261 male (77%) and 78 female (23%) members.

Possibly – although not necessarily ­- connected to this, is the approach taken towards women in intelligence by scholars of intelligence. As mentioned earlier in the lecture, biographies of exotic and daring women spies constitute the greater part of the literature on women and intelligence. Is this because there are so few female academics working in the field of intelligence?

Further, the discipline of intelligence studies lacks a systematic feminist critique. An article from last year’s Intelligence and National Security points out that: ‘feminist approaches to intelligence theorising that foreground gender, sexuality, and difference in understanding what intelligence is/does are nearly non-existent’ – even though feminist theory could be a useful approach to some of the concepts that we wrestle with in intelligence studies. Importantly it can make the connection between feminism and intelligence organisations as institutions of oppression: ‘intelligence has been used to oppress, and to maintain systems of oppression,’ it says. As Simone de Beauvoir said: ‘All oppression creates a state of war’ (The Second Sex). Intelligence has been used to repress information, ideas and sometimes people as well.

Summary

The recent report on UK intelligence diversity spoke of the need for more women not because of ethical consideration but because of the need for a divergence of views. I would suggest that the field of Intelligence Studies needs more female academics for the same reason.

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^[1] , p301.