Gender parity in international organizations: discourses v numbers

Abstract

Throughout the history of contemporary feminism, women’s presence in the public sphere has been a perennial issue, demanding all sorts of strategies to promote women’s inclusion in the economic and political arenas. Starting in the 1980s, feminist scholars in International Relations have questioned the absence of women in the international arena, alongside the pervasive gender hierarchies of the international system. Not only was it that women had been systematically excluded from politics, but the scholarship in IR had largely ignored feminist claims about the gendering of international politics. Largely animated by feminist movements and the nascent feminist debates in IR, the World Conferences on Women (1975, 1980, 1985, and 1995) stressed the paramount need for taking women’s demands seriously. Such demands encompassed social, economic, and political domains, echoing decades of feminist struggles in the first, second and third worlds. The United Nations played a crucial role in fostering an agenda of gender equality and women’s rights as human rights, which have been a quintessential part of the Millennium Development Goals and, more recently, the Sustainable Development Goals.

Furthermore, gender-oriented policies have been promoted in myriad UN agencies and international organisations, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Despite all these efforts purporting to raise awareness about gender equality and women’s rights, as well as about the need for more inclusive policies for women in the international arena, women’s presence in international fora as leaders has been remarkably low. As for the United Nations, until now no woman has been elected to the organisation’s highest post, that of secretary general, and only recently the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have had female managing directors. These sobering results show a different picture of international organisations that promote gender equality as their political and social commitment, whilst failing to comply with the very same discourse when it comes to women’s leadership in their formal structures. In this context, the present article aims to assess quantitatively and qualitatively women’s presence in leadership roles at the United Nations and international economic organisations (namely, the IMF, WB and World Trade Organisation). It departs from the following research question: What is the current state of affairs of women’s participation in the highest posts of the United Nations and the international organizations of the global economic system? Methodologically, we resort to descriptive statistical data of women’s presence at various agencies of the United Nations and the aforementioned economic institutions from 1990-2018. Of greatest concern will be those occupying the posts of presidency and vice-presidency.

Counting women is a traditional approach in feminist studies in IR, and it is a paramount step in making women count. The second goal of our paper, thus, derives directly from the data: by mapping the few women occupying positions of leadership in international organisations, we can assess the gender structures operating to the disadvantage of women. In order to do so, we resort to feminist theories as developed in political science and IR, for they provide the conceptual tools to provide data with meaning. We focus primarily on how gendered institutions confine women to specific gendered roles that emanate from the private sphere of domesticity. This means that women suffer from various exclusionary dynamics: firstly, they are excluded from leadership roles for the fact of being women; secondly, the few who manage to break through the glass ceiling of a masculine international arena are assigned positions that mimic the elements of the private sphere. Frequently, female leaders are responsible for social issues, childhood, food security, education, and culture, all of which are labeled as soft issues, or belonging to the domain of low politics.

Feminist IR scholars have extensively denounced these gendered structures as part of how men preserve their privileges under the framework of hegemonic masculinity. Therefore, we draw on the work of several IR feminists who are concerned with the theoretical questioning and empirical unravelling of such gender hierarchies to interpret our data beyond the mere counting of women. We contend that women in leadership roles in the United Nations and international economic organisations more frequently occupy portfolios that are seen as soft issues or low politics. Likewise, these roles are often associated with the care for others, which reinforces gender roles and hierarchies. Women are more likely to occupy the presidencies and vice-presidencies of agencies such as UNICEF, UNESCO, WFP, and OHCHR, all of which deal with issues associated with childhood, education, culture, food security and human rights. We conclude that an apparent glass ceiling – the invisible barrier that prevents women from reaching higher and more prestigious posts in their professional careers – still remains in international institutions, limiting the participation of women in decision-making fora. The few female leaders who manage to reach the highest posts in the international arena are more likely to be exceptions of a pervasive phenomenon of gender inequality and lack of representativeness. The discourses embraced by the United Nations and international economic organisations fail to meet the minimal criteria for gender parity within these organizations’ structures, and even where women have been assigned leadership roles, gender stereotypes still prevail. Further evidence revealed in our research refers to the regional representativeness of the few female leaders in these international organisations: about 55% of them come from Western Europe and North America. Latin American and African women are strongly underrepresented in the United Nations system, as well as in the Bretton Woods institutions, which is itself problematic because the particular perspectives of women from the Global South are also excluded from debates in these international fora.

Therefore, international organisations also face the challenge of fostering the diversity of feminist perspectives by developing strategies to include Global South women in their formal structure, ideally as leaders. In this sense, our paper draws attention to the importance of pluralism not only in terms of gender parity, but also of a feminist worldview. In order to make women count in the international arena, the United Nations and international economic organisations have to fully commit themselves to concrete policies for women’s inclusion, not only as heads of the institutions, but also in lower hierarchies where policies are designed. Only by acknowledging that women’s perspectives matter, can we achieve the goals of gender equality.