Eighty years ago, 850 delegates from 50 nations met in San Francisco to create the United Nations. Of this number, only eight were women, of whom just four signed the Charter on 26 June 1945.
During the first General Assembly in 1946, Eleanor Roosevelt, an early advocate of the Organization and a delegate from the United States called on the women of the world to take a more active part in national and international affairs. The same year, the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) was formed by the Economic and Social Council, with the goal of ensuring women’s equality and promoting women’s political, economic, social and educational rights. During its first few decades, CSW contributed to, among other things, the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on the Political Rights of Women, and worked on improving the situation of women in developing countries.
Inside the UN itself, however, women were frequently relegated to supporting roles, mostly filling the lower ranks of professional posts (below P-4) and secretarial and clerical General Service jobs.
Beginning in the 1970s, the General Assembly, increasingly concerned at the under-representation of women in the Secretariat, particularly at the senior level, passed resolutions asking for appropriate measures to ensure equal opportunities for the employment of qualified women. With the International Year of the Woman in 1975, the United Nations Decade for Women (1976-1985), and the passage of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), women began to increasingly advocate for better conditions at the UN. For instance, on International Women’s Day in 1981, the Ad Hoc Group on Equal Rights for Women wore black to protest the lack of opportunities for women in the UN system.
The Decade of Women ended with the Nairobi Forward-looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women, which recognized that political, economic, and social development was inherently limited by the absence of women in the decision-making process. This led to an increasing push from the UN to lead by example. To do so, the UN created a post of the Coordinator for the Improvement of the Status of Women in the Secretariat and in 1986 formed the Steering Committee for the Improvement of the Status of Women in the Secretariat. The Committee, which included future Secretary-General Kofi Annan, was tasked with studying the problem, providing guidance and making recommendations, and advising the Secretary-General on the progress made.
The recruitment goals steadily began to increase as the General Assembly passed resolutions to increase the number of women in posts subject to geographical distribution from 25% in 1985, to 30% in 1990, to 35% in 1995, and eventually to 50% in 2000.
The aspirations frequently lagged with reality and the UN struggled to meet these deadlines. Nevertheless, progress was made as the number of women in the USG and ASG positions began to increase. For the 1990 International Women’s Day, the Secretary-General announced that women staff participated in almost equal numbers with men on the civilian side of the United Nations Transition Assistance Group (UNTAG) in Namibia and the UN Observation Mission to Verify the Election in Nicaragua (ONUVEN), stating that “These women acquitted themselves in a manner which should once and for all erase doubts – which I for one never had – regarding the ability of women to perform as well as men in any and all areas of the United Nations activity.”
In 2010, the creation of UN Women as an entity within the UN System combined the disparate organizations working within the UN to better address gender equality and the empowerment of women both within the UN and throughout the world.
In his oath of office, Secretary-General Guterres made it clear that achieving gender parity was a top priority and promised to work to achieve this before the target year in 2030. In the past 80 years progress has been made, with many departments in the Secretariat being able boast of an equal or almost equal representation of staff. The work still continues.