by Anne Marie Goetz
On October 22, the ‘UN Senior Leadership Dashboard’ was launched by the Center for Global Affairs, the NYU Center for International Cooperation, and the missions to the UN of Ghana and the State of Qatar, both of whom are the co-chairs of the United Nations Group of Friends of Gender Parity, composed of 152 UN Member States.
The Dashboard is an interactive resource that presents data drawn from 25 years of UN press releases announcing new senior appointments (assistant secretary-generals, undersecretary-generals, and deputy secretary-generals). The data was collected by a digital tool that harvests information about senior appointees from press releases, information such as the gender of senior appointments, their country of origin, their age, marital status and educational background. The result is a resource that enables the visualization of trends in real time – and over time since 1995 — in the proportion of women in senior leadership, as well as the distribution of senior appointments amongst the world’s regions.
In 1994, the UN set itself a target of reaching gender parity in all levels of staff by the year 2000. That deadline was missed, and by 2017, women only averaged about a third of staff members overall. After taking office in 2017, UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres made a commitment to accelerating the recruitment, promotion and retention of women, and in September 2017, announced a Gender Parity Strategy. The Strategy set 2026 as the deadline for full parity in all parts to the UN, but it recognized that gender parity is farthest behind in the traditionally male-dominated fields of the UN’s peace and security work (peacekeeping, UN mission leadership, mediation, peacebuilding), and therefore set a deadline of 2028 for these institutions (UN peacekeeping and political missions, the Department of Peace Operations, the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs). The proportion of women in staff and leadership in these institutions had been, until 2018, stuck at below a quarter of the total with such a slow rate of improvement that the SG’s Gender Parity Strategy declared it would take 703 years to reach parity in UN mission leadership.
The Dashboard reveals that there have been significant efforts to rectify this situation. Analysis by former CGA student Foteini Papagioti and CIC’s Paul von Chamier shows that 2018, female appointments to head of mission (Special Representative of the Secretary-General or SRSG) and deputy head (Deputy SRSG or DSRSG) surged 30 points, to 77 percent. This momentum stalled in 2019, with women representing only 29 percent of appointees, before jumping to 83 percent of new appointmnts so far this year. This brings the proportion of women in the management of the UN’s peacekeeping and peacebuilding missions to about one third and in fact, three UN missions currently have all-female leadership (SRSG and DSRSGs): Cyprus, Iraq and Afghanistan — an unprecedented advance for the UN system.
During the panel discussion that launched the dashboard, four seasoned UN peace and security leaders commented on the obstacles to increasing women’s presence amongst UN mission leaders. The head of the UN’s Department of Peace Operations, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, acknowledged that when, as now, there are budget cuts and mission downsizing, mid-level male staff have objected to affirmative action steps that prioritize the promotion of women. Former SRSGs Karin Landgren and Ameerah Haq praised initiatives such as the UN’s Senior Women Talent Pipeline, designed to cultivate more women candidates for top positions, as well as special provisions to support mission leadership, such as dedicated senior mentors to provide advice on the complex challenges that mission leaders face. Former SRSG and current Special Advisor to the SG on Sudan Nicholas Haysom acknowledged that when political considerations are the primary determinants of selection of senior leaders, the merit-based provisions that have been painstakingly established via many internal reviews, including the 2015 High-level Independent Panel on the United Nations Peace Operations, can be leap-frogged, to the detriment of principle-driven reform efforts such as the Gender Parity Strategy. Anita Bhatia, the Assistant Secretary-General of UN Women, closed the meeting by commenting that if the UN is serious about reaching gender parity, it should consider the ‘stock and flow’ problem in women’s access to senior positions: the ‘stock’ of women available for higher appointments is smaller than the stock of male candidates because of the higher outflow or turnover rate of women staff. She argued that this situation could justify limiting new recruitment drives to all-female candidates in order to increase the ‘stock’ of women available for higher positions.
The Dashboard is a portal to information not just about the ratio of women to men in UN senior appointments, but also information bout their geographic origin. Soon, information will be added regarding other features of senior managers such as their age and educational background. This resource will supplement other sources of information in the UN such as the UN Secretariat’s dashboard on gender parity), and enable the monitoring of trends in appointments in real time.
Anne Marie Goetz is Clinical Associate Professor at the NYU SPS Center for Global Affairs.