Promoting gender equality with staff members
Since the creation of UN Women in 2011, the UN finally has a dedicated entity for promoting gender equality with staff members who self-identify as “feminist bureaucrats.” Yet UN Women also runs the risk of repeating a silo mentality common to all gender-equality approaches at the UN — that is, appointing gender focal points across departments, specialized agencies and programs rather than rethinking gender equality across all positions throughout the UN.
The most recent available data compiled by UN Women in 2014 shows that the UN Secretariat, the UN’s policy-making circle, remains distant from achieving gender parity in the three highest pay levels: women make up 26.2 percent of staff at D-2 (Director); 21.3 percent at Assistant Secretary-General (ASG); and 28.6 percent at Under Secretary-General (USG) level.
Former Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, a Korean, proclaimed to have attained gender parity among the UN’s senior leadership during his tenure and looked to be on track in the middle of his second five-year term, which ended in December 2016. Yet Ban’s balance sheet after 10 years at the helm painted a different picture: in 2015, he appointed only 10 women out of 63 assistant secretaries-general and under secretaries-general appointments; in 2016, he appointed 13 out of 36.
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