Women still face obstacles in reaching senior staff positions at UN – report

The United Nations has given itself a mixed report card for its efforts to reach the General Assembly’s target of equality between the numbers of men and women in professional and managerial staffing.

A report from Secretary-General Kofi Annan to the Assembly says although the proportion of women at those levels in the Secretariat, with contracts for one year or longer, rose 1.7 percent last year to 37.4 per cent on 30 June of this year, “the analysis of the longer-term trends portrays a picture of uneven progress in women’s representation at all levels.”

The reasons cited include unacknowledged biases among hiring managers who are not being held accountable. Another cause relates to expectations that managers must “work long hours and always be available,” thereby fostering imbalances between work and home life.

In addition, jobs for spouses of UN employees are not always easy to find in UN host countries and permission to work is sometimes slow in coming, making transfers impossible for some families, the survey adds. The UN, however, has become the second largest client of partnerjob.com, a non-profit agency which aims to find jobs for spouses of transferred staff.

The annual growth rate towards the 50/50 goal is expected to rise by only 0.4 per cent in professional and higher categories for appointments of one year or more, the report says.

It recommends some three dozen measures to deal with all the obstacles to women’s advancement that have been found so far while suggesting a deeper examination of other obstructions that are more difficult to analyze because “barriers to career progression for women become more informal and, thus, harder to identify, particularly at the more senior levels of the Organization.”

An accompanying chart shows that on 30 June of this year women formed 83.3 per cent of staff at the lowest professional level, the P-1, but 16.7 per cent of the highest staff level, the Under-Secretaries-General.

For positions filled according to geographical region, women make up 42.3 percent of staff and the ratio is growing by 1 per cent per year, the report says.

Meanwhile, “the Secretary-General fully shares the views of the General Assembly regarding the issue of creating a work environment in the United Nations system that is free of harassment, especially sexual harassment, and remains firmly committed to a zero-tolerance policy in this regard.”