Earlier this month, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres unveiled a “system-wide” gender parity strategy which sets 2021 as the target for gender-balance in senior leadership, and 2028 for parity across the entire system. Whether or not heads will roll if these targets aren’t met is another question. It is notoriously difficult to sanction UN staff for abuses, let alone for failing to implement a personnel policy.
Feminist critics of the UN could be forgiven for not getting excited. We’ve been here before. A 1994 general assembly resolution set 2000 as the target for gender parity within the UN secretariat. That year came and went: no gender parity. No heads rolled.
Subsequent initiatives similarly lacked commitment, prompting one former special representative of the secretary-general, Karin Landgren, to describe gender parity as the UN’s “lost agenda.” UN Women said little about stalled progress and it took an undergraduate student’s investigation, published by 50.50 last year, to show that under Ban Ki-moon, Guterres’s predecessor, the proportion of women at top levels (around 22% in 2016) and the parity agenda were far off track.
But this time it really is different. Responsibility for getting to parity is assigned to Guterres’s own senior advisor on policy. This, along with conflict prevention, is her main job. She has a dedicated and highly-respected senior gender advisor to monitor progress. There are numeric targets for annual increases in proportions of women in every staff category, for every UN entity, as well as provisions for databases of women candidates, ‘strategic’ head-hunting, specialised training, and fast-track programs.
For the UN secretariat — which has more than 40,000 staff members in peace operations and diplomatic work — the plan is particularly interventionist. If a secretariat office or field mission fails to meet female recruitment targets by December 2019, a central personnel department will take over hiring for a year. As negative incentives…