When the UN Charter was written 50 years ago, it included a farsighted promise of equality for women within its system. The document pledged “no restrictions on the eligibility of men and women to participate in any capacity and under conditions of equality.”
Half a century later, the United Nations has fallen behind many other large institutions in this area and has been unable to live up to its own promises.
“We are a long way from gender equality in the United Nations Secretariat,” Secretary Gen. Boutros Boutros-Ghali told a staff audience last fall at the annual day devoted to honoring employees.
“The goals which I hoped we would achieve have not been reached. Progress has fallen far short of expectations.”
As the United Nations prepares for its fourth-and probably most contentious-international conference on the rights and conditions of the world’s women, some officials of this vast organization and critics outside are demanding closer scrutiny of the institution.
In a 1994 Ford Foundation study, “Renewing the United Nations System,” Sir Brian Urquhart and Erskine Childers, international policy analysts with extensive knowledge of the organization, said that by failing “abjectly” as an equal opportunity employer, the United Nations is in violation of its own founding document.
A pledge to fill 25 percent of executive jobs with women by this year is well below target, at about 15 percent.
Madeleine Albright, the chief American delegate to the United Nations, had earlier taken up the issue of opportunities for women in the UN system in talks with the secretary general. But neither Congress nor the Clinton administration has tried to press the issue further, such as by linking the issue to American financial support.
Boutros-Ghali has been considered very supportive of female colleagues since his years as a Cairo University law professor, associates say. He has made a stronger commitment to equality for women than any previous secretary general.
He recently made it clear that he wanted to appoint a woman to head UNICEF, the UN Children’s Fund. The request sent the Clinton administration scurrying for new candidates. The White House had nominated a man.
Several cultural and political factors have combined to create a uniquely difficult environment in the UN for women.
Organizationally, this is unlike a corporation or government department with clear lines of authority and responsibility. It is an institution beholden to its 185 member nations. The organization’s political appointments are filled by national leaders, often with their male relatives or allies.
Culturally, the UN system appears a model of diversity. Employees communicate in many languages, dress in arresting national costumes and fill offices with art from all corners of the earth.
But multiculturalism has a downside for the women, who work without the protection of national or New York laws against discrimination in an institution in which whistle-blowing is anathema.
“We are a collection of all the world’s chauvinisms,” a woman in middle management said.
“Working here is like walking on eggshells. You never know when you turn a corner which chauvinism you are going to meet.”
While accounts of unwanted sexual overtures circulate around UN headquarters and offices abroad-in Rome, Vienna, Nairobi and Bangkok in recent years-the more pervasive condition, say the women who work at UN headquarters here, is prejudice against women in authority, painful disrespect and subtle but damaging stereotyping of female staff members.
“Women have to work harder, look better and always be in a good mood,” said Rosario Green, the highest-ranking woman in the UN executive structure.
Co-workers do not make crude physical suggestions about what might be wrong when a man is out of sorts, as they do about a woman, she said. She said she had heard enough such comments to enrage her.
Green said in an interview that she considers women to be natural managers whose talents are needed by an organization not known for its management skills.
Green, a former under secretary in the Mexican foreign ministry, is an assistant secretary general and political adviser to the secretary general and a member of a new task force on opportunity for women here. An earlier task force produced guidelines but without an effective means of enforcement.
Guidelines and goals for equal opportunity are set by the secretary general and the General Assembly, but they are not enforced. The United Nations’ highest appeal board, the administrative tribunal, has no women among its seven members.
The tribunal recently awarded $2,000 in compensation to a male employee who filed a discrimination complaint when he did not make a list of finalists for a job for which an appointments board had sought qualified women. The woman who had been appointed kept the job, however.
The first sexual harassment suit to be settled by the United Nations ended in December, when Catherine Claxton, an American, was awarded more than $210,000 in compensation and costs.
Few cases make their way into the formal tribunal system because many foreign women, especially at the clerical level, say they fear losing their jobs and with them their American visas.
Women who work here say discrimination against them is pervasive. An American said in a recent interview that when she asked about a vacant management position in Bangladesh, she was told that the men in that office would not accept a female boss.
Earlier, as an intern, she had been frozen out of an effective role in a UN office in Vienna because several Middle Eastern men there refused to work with her.
Margaret Anstee, who is British, was sent to Angola in 1992 as the secretary general’s special representative during the first, and ultimately abortive, attempt to enforce a peace agreement between the Marxist government and the rebel army led by Jonas Savimbi. She told the Security Council later that she was alternately ignored and insulted.
“She told of a meeting with Savimbi, who didn’t like her,” Albright said. “He told her: `You’re just a grandmother. Go back to your rocking chair.’ “
“When it came my turn to talk,” Albright said in a recent interview, “I said that I really empathized with what she said, that I felt a great sense of sisterhood-a word that clearly no one else had ever uttered in the Security Council.
“There is no question about it: This is a very male organization.”
While many of the complaints from women are against men from the more traditional cultures, women say they suffer discrimination from Western men as well.
Nafis Sadik, director of the UN Population Fund and organizer of last year’s population conference in Cairo, said that when she arrived from Pakistan in the 1970s, “Western men saw me as an Asian woman: very decorative, but I couldn’t possibly have any ideas.
“When I first came to the UN, I would say something, and it sort of disappeared into a well,” said Sadik, who had been known in Asia as a courageous public health expert before she came to work for the agency. “So then I started to be more aggressive.”
