The Religious Consultation
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Inter Press Service, March 10, 2005 U.N. Chief Faulted
for Bypassing Women for Top Jobs UNITED NATIONS, Mar 10 (IPS) - When the outgoing executive director of the U.N. children's agency UNICEF addressed reporters last week, she took a parting shot at the U.N. Secretariat's recruitment policies, which are heavily weighted against women. ”I am sorry to see that positions of power continue to elude women, including here at the United Nations,” Carol Bellamy told a news conference. Bellamy said she was pleased that her successor at UNICEF is a woman-- Ann Veneman, a former U.S. agricultural secretary-- ”yet I am dismayed that UNICEF is among the few U.N. agencies currently headed by a woman.” She said there were many opportunities for women that were coming up-- including the post of administrator of the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) and president of the World Bank. After 10 years at UNICEF, she discovered that the importance of women in development efforts was mostly being ”grievously overlooked.” As a two-week long review of the 1995 Beijing conference on women comes to close later this week, women's organisations were sharply critical of Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who has failed to honour his own commitments to gender equality in the U.N. system while he preaches its virtues to the rest of the world. ”We are very disappointed,” Charlotte Bunch of the Centre for Women's Global Leadership told IPS. She said Annan was given an opportunity in his opening speech at the review conference last week to send a message. But he failed to grab that opportunity. ”What he said (about gender equality) was good,” Bunch said, ”but he did not deal with what he himself would do at the United Nations.” Not only should there be more women at decision-making levels in the U.N. system, Bunch argued, but also there was an urgent need to upgrade some of the divisions and departments dealing with women's issues. Of the 31 under-secretaries-general (USGs) in Annan's ”senior management group”, only eight are women, including his deputy Louise Frechette of Canada. The other seven are: Catherine Bertini (U.S.), head of management and administration; Anna Tibaijuka (Tanzania), head of Habitat in Nairobi; Brigita Schmognerova (Slovak Republic), head of Economic Commission for Europe; Mervat Tallawy (Egypt), head of the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia; Thoraya Ahmed Obaid (Saudi Arabia), head of the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA); Louise Arbour (Canada), High Commissioner for Human Rights; and Carol Bellamy (U.S.), executive director UNICEF. Bunch said there were about 60 ”special representatives” and ”deputy special representatives” of the secretary-general (dubbed SRSGs and DSRSGs) who are personally appointed by Annan to oversee political and humanitarian crises worldwide. But of these, only about four are women, she added. Each of these SRSGs, who hold the rank of USGs, earn as much as 186,000 dollars per year, as their numbers keep increasing every month. More than 10 years ago, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution calling for 50-50 gender parity in the U.N. system, with a target date of 2000. ”That gender balance goal is long overdue,” Jessica Neuwirth, president of the New York-based Equality Now, told a seminar Tuesday. As of December last year, she pointed out, the representation of women in the professional and higher categories was 37.1 percent. The General Assembly has expressed concern that there has been ”a slowing of progress”, and between 1998 and 2003 there was almost no progress in this particular category, she said. By her reckoning, Neuwirth said there were only six women USGs in Annan's senior management team. ”That is less than 20 percent,” she added. In 1995, noting that the United Nations was ”continuing to deny itself the benefits of women's leadership by their under-representation at decision-making levels with the Secretariat,” the Platform for Action (adopted by 189 member states at the 1995 Beijing conference on women) called for the development of ”mechanisms to nominate women candidates for appointment to senior posts in the United Nations.” ”Maybe now, 10 years later, it is time to establish a serious mechanism to ensure the nomination of women candidates to serve in the most senior U.N. posts, where there has never been a woman,” Neuwirth added. She also said that while an under-secretary-general was appointed as high commissioner for human rights after the 1993 U.N. conference on human rights, Annan named only a lower-level assistant secretary-general to advise him on gender issues following the 1995 Fourth U.N. conference on women in Beijing. ”The U.N. Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), which is housed within the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), has lower status than a regional bureau of that agency,” she complained. Asked to respond to charges by women's groups, a senior U.N. official mostly blamed member states for the current state of affairs. ”When we ask them to nominate candidates, most of them rarely or ever come up with women candidates,” he said, adding that several requests for women peacekeepers have never had any positive responses from member states. Angela King, a former U.N. special adviser on gender issues, was also implicitly critical of member states when she posed a series of questions before a meeting of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) last week. ”Why has the General Assembly had only two women presidents? (Vijay Lakshmi Pandit of India and Angie Brooks of Liberia) Why are so few women still involved around the peace table? Why is it so difficult to have gender perspectives included in conference outcomes and action programmes?” she asked. Last month, a coalition of 14 international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) wrote a letter to Annan urging him to ”speak out strongly” on concrete measures to advance gender equality within the United Nations, as well as urge governments to make the promotion and realisation of women's empowerment and human rights a priority. The coalition -- which included Women's Environment and Development Organisation, the International Federation of Business and Professional Women, Equality Now and the Centre for Women's Global Leadership -- said the percentage of women in high level posts within the United Nations needs to be addressed. ”There is currently no under-secretary-general dedicated to, and only one assistant secretary-general working on, gender issues,” the letter added. Thirty years after the first International Women's Conference (in Mexico in 1975), ”it is shocking that only three or four of your almost 60 special representatives and deputy special representatives are women,” the coalition complained. ”This and the lack of progress in appointing women heads of agencies underscores the problems with implementation of gender equality policies even within the U.N. system,” it added. ”A clear commitment on your part to appoint more women would show strong leadership and management in the area of gender equality,” the NGOs told Annan. Taina Bien-Aim, executive director of Equality Now, told IPS that in 1996, her organisation launched a campaign calling on the United Nations to elect a woman secretary-general. ”In light of the meetings this week commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Beijing Conference, it is timely that this issue is raised again, given the commitments made by governments to remedy the under-representation of women at decision-making levels within the Secretariat,” she said. The United Nations itself has repeatedly reaffirmed that the goals of equality, development and peace cannot be achieved ”without the active participation of women and the incorporation of women's perspective at all levels of decision-making” and yet these commitments are not being fulfilled, she said. In addition, Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) urges the Secretary-General ”to appoint more women as special representatives and envoys” within the UN system, in particular at high levels of decision-making. ”We urge government representatives and the Security Council members to consider with great care and urgency candidacies of qualified women for the post of Secretary-General, particularly in light of the pledges made in Beijing 10 year ago and reaffirmed 5 years ago during the Beijing plus 5 review,” she added. << Inter Press Service -- 3/10/05 >> Home About Us Newsletters News Archives Donate
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