The Biden administration has a woman, Vice President Kamala Harris, in its second-highest position, and 61% of White House appointees are women.

Now, it has declared its intention to “protect and empower women around the world.”

Gender equity and a gender agenda are two ingredients of a “feminist foreign policy” — an international agenda that aims to dismantle the male-dominated systems of foreign aid, trade, defense, immigration, and diplomacy that sideline women and other minority groups worldwide. A feminist foreign policy reenvisions a country’s national interests, moving them away from military security and global dominance to position equality as the basis of a healthy, peaceful world.

This is in keeping with Hillary Clinton’s groundbreaking 1995 statement at the United Nations, “Women’s rights are human rights.”

The world could change in some positive ways if more countries, especially a power like the United States, made a concerted effort to improve women’s rights abroad, our scholarship on gender and security suggests. Research shows that countries with more gender equality are less likely than other countries to experience civil war. Gender equality is also linked with good governance: Countries that exploit women are far more unstable.

Women aren’t yet any country’s top foreign policy priority. But ever more countries are starting to at least write them into the agenda.

Read the full article about feminist foreign policy by Rollie Lal at Global Citizen.