It's Not About Being the Only Man in the Room: What Feminist (Foreign) Policy Really Asks of Men

Since beginning my PhD research on Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP), I have had the privilege of attending countless workshops, seminars, conferences, and public events exploring feminist approaches to international relations and foreign policymaking. Many have been academic, while others have brought together policymakers, diplomats, and practitioners. Across these different settings, however, one particular opening line has become remarkably familiar: "I'm the only man in the room," often followed by a self-deprecating joke such as "I feel a bit intimidated" or "Is there any other man in the audience?" The audience usually responds with a polite laugh, and the conversation moves on.

At first glance, these remarks seem harmless. Yet I have come to believe that they reveal something worth unpacking, together, regardless of our gender or identity.

Before going any further, let me be clear: this blog is not about exclusion. On the contrary, transformative feminist policymaking needs everyone. It needs men because meaningful change requires those who currently benefit most from existing structures to take part in transforming them. Their presence, therefore, is not the issue. The problem is neither that men notice they are in the minority. The problem is that this observation so often becomes the lens through which conversations about feminist foreign policy begin. Instead of centering the purpose of the event - whether feminist foreign policy can challenge and transform what bell hooks describes as the imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy - the spotlight shifts to the experience of a man, often one who already occupies a position of institutional power.

In doing so, the conversation is once again reduced to questions of who is included or excluded, rather than how entrenched systems of power are reproduced, contested, and transformed. More subtly, it recenters the perspective of the socially dominant group instead of creating space for those whose experiences have historically been marginalised. The opening narrative shifts from why these conversations matter to how it feels for a man to be present in them. What if, instead, we shifted the question? Rather than saying "I'm the only man in the room," why not ask: "Why are there still so few men engaging in these conversations?" That simple shift moves us from a statement of self-awareness to an act of politics. 

One possible explanation is that many men do not stay away because they feel unwelcome. Rather, they have rarely been encouraged - or challenged - to engage with the structural questions that feminism raises. What appears, at first glance, to be a simple numerical imbalance is in fact symptomatic of something much deeper: who is expected to care about gender, whose responsibility feminism is perceived to be, and who is invited to imagine themselves as agents of change. As bell hooks famously reminded us, "Feminism is for everybody." Yet feminist-informed policymaking continues to be treated by many as a "women's issue" rather than as a project of institutional transformation to dismantle systems of domination and transform unequal power relations that concern us all. 

For many men, being one of the few male participants at an FFP conference may be the closest they will come to experiencing numerical minority status. Once they leave the auditorium, however, they remain members of the socially dominant gender in most professional and political settings. Of course, intersectionality reminds us that no identity is singular and that privilege and marginalisation coexist in complex ways. Nevertheless, the men making these remarks often embody many of the identities that continue to enjoy structural advantages within our institutions. That temporary feeling of being outnumbered deserves acknowledgement, but perhaps it should also become an opportunity for empathy. What does it feel like to enter a room where few people look like me? Does it make me more hesitant to speak? How am I perceived? Do I belong here? For many members of historically marginalised communities, these are not occasional questions prompted by a conference. They are recurring questions that have shaped their professional and personal lives for generations. 

Interestingly, during my own research, several men involved in the development of Feminist Foreign Policy in both Europe and Latin America independently described the same feeling: the unusual experience of being one of the few men in the room. The consistency of these reflections suggests that this is not merely an individual impression but a broader socio-cultural pattern worth examining. As feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe has long encouraged us to ask, "Where are the women?" Perhaps today we should also ask another question: where are the men? Why do so many men still approach feminist spaces as places they attend, rather than as spaces in which they have a responsibility to participate and contribute?

So why does any of this matter? Because building a stronger feminist foreign policy ecosystem requires moving beyond the outdated binary of women's issues versus men's issues. Feminist-informed policies are not a project for women alone; they are a collective project aimed at transforming institutions, investment priorities, leadership cultures and opportunities for everyone. The question for men should gradually move away from "How does it feel to be the only man in the room?" towards more meaningful ones. In the short term, how can I encourage more men to engage in these conversations? In the long term: How do we build institutions where gender is no longer the most remarkable thing about who happens to be in the room?

The invitation is simple: speak less about your presence, and more about your contribution. Stop centering your discomfort as the 'only man in the room' and start dismantling the structures that keep the room exclusive in the first place. We don’t need men who feel exceptional just for showing up; we need allies who treat feminist policy as a collective project of institutional transformation. True progress starts when we stop announcing our gender at the door and start doing the work to ensure it’s no longer the most remarkable thing about who is in the room. Perhaps that will be the moment we know feminist foreign policy has truly begun to transform not only our institutions, but also the way we understand our place within them.