UNOG Library Talk: “UN and Women’s Leadership: How can we move forward?”

Ms. Torild Skard, welcome back.
Excellencies,
Dear Colleagues,
Ladies and gentlemen:

It is a pleasure to welcome you to this library talk on the UN and women’s leadership. The library talks are part of our efforts to bridge the gap between research and practice. Today, we are privileged to have with us Ms. Torild Skard who serves as a perfect example that this gap can be bridged even by one person alone. She is an excellent researcher, while having also held senior positions in politics and within the UN system. She is a leader who has studied women’s leadership. Ms. Skard, thank you very much for sharing your experience and advice with us today.

In the second sentence of our charter, we, the peoples of the United Nations, reaffirmed our faith in the equal rights of men and women. This commitment has been reiterated repeatedly in four world conferences on women since 1975. And yet, in 2016, women still only make up 34.8% of our own staff worldwide [A/71/360]. Non-field operations, like Geneva, are closer to parity at around 48%, but there are very few women in our field operations – a little over 21.5%. And there are still far too few female colleagues in senior positions. Only 17 of the 78 Under-Secretaries General in mid-2016 were women, and we all know what the ratio has been like at the head of our organization since its establishment. We have to catch up in terms of leadership. And I am sure that Ms. Skard has some valuable insights as to how we can make that happen sooner.

The UN is certainly not the only institution, where progress has been too slow. Our colleagues from the Inter-Parliamentary Union tell us that women only make up 22.8% of parliamentarians worldwide. And our colleagues at the World Economic Forum highlight that there are just five countries around the world where leading companies have at least 30% of women in leadership¹.

Here in International Geneva, we are trying to change these trends. The heads of the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the World Economic Forum, for example, are both among the Geneva Gender Champions, together with another 120 members, leaders and academics and so on. As many of you know, this network of now more than 120 heads of organizations was launched in 2015 by the Permanent Representative of the USA, the NGO Women@TheTable and myself. Since then we have made progress on the concrete and measurable targets that each Gender Champion has made there. At UNOG, for example, we have put in place a gender policy, which, bizarrely, we didn’t have before, and I want to take the opportunity to thank Nicole Maguire and Sigrun Habermann who have been involved in these efforts from the beginning.

Today’s event is one of many that we are organizing to keep the issue of gender equality on the table, and to keep reviewing where we can improve. I want to thank my fellow Gender Champions who are here to discuss today, and again thank you to Ms. Skard for joining us and sharing your knowledge on women’s leadership both at the UN and at the national level.

Thank you very much.



¹https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/09/women-in-ceo-roles-slow-progress