Women make "bloody good spies" because they can interpret emotions, multitask and they attract far less suspicion, especially as a married woman with children.
In an interview with the Times, 'Lisa' an MI6 agent, called her life as a female spy "awesome, completely unique"
"I have successfully countered proliferation. I have made the world a safer place through some of the operations I have done and the agents I have run,” she said.
Women are good at multi-tasking and using emotion, a female spy has said
“It is always interesting. There is massive diversity. You can be covering completely different geographical places during a career. There is a strong moral reward to it.”
And Lisa says she is a particularly useful asset because she is "less of a threat than a single female,” being married with young children. “They [enemy combatants] have mothers, sisters, daughters.
“We are quite good at multi-tasking. We are quite good at tapping into different emotional resources. You can get into a lot of places. But all of those skills are shared by many of my male colleagues.”
But one of TV's most famous female spies, Clare Danes' bi-polar Carrie Mathison in Homeland, would not have made it very far in MI6, Lisa said. “You would be too much of a risk.”
In 2012, the head of Israeli spy agency, Mossad, said women spies had an superior skills in certain areas.
“Women have a distinct advantage in secret warfare because of their ability to multitask,” Tamir Pardo said to Israel’s Lady Globes. Women are “better at playing a role” and superior to men when it comes to “suppressing their ego in order to attain the goal.”
“Women are gifted at deciphering situations. Contrary to stereotypes, you see that women’s abilities are superior to men in terms of understanding the territory, reading situations, spatial awareness. When they’re good, they’re very good.”