United Nations Radio

Women's department to rectify gender inequality

PRES: With the General Assembly's annual session in September fast approaching, The UN is poised to create a powerful new department for women. The UN has been involved in promoting the rights of women and girls from its inception, from organizing major conferences on women to adopting a treaty on women's rights. But a more cohesive approach is needed, many women's rights activists believe, if we are ever to ensure real equality between women and men. Farah Ahmed filed this report.

VOXPOP: "it is a puzzle why such an agency has not been created before"

NARR: The idea for such a body emerged in 2006 from plans to reform the UN by Kofi Annan, the former secretary general, after women's groups pressured the UN to recognize a need to restructure the organization's gender architecture. Paula Donovan, co-director of AIDS-Free World, notes that the UN has given billions of dollars for the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, and UNICEF, the UN children's agency, but there has not been the equivalent attention given to women, who make up half the world's population.

DONOVAN: There is UNIFEM, which is managed by UNDP, but UNIFEM is one of four gender entities and all together they have a budget of about 220 million dollars, that budget is a little smaller than the budget that say UNICEF would have for its country program in Ethiopia. What exists just isn't doing the job at all, and we need to create something from scratch.

NARR: Yet why has an attempt at building this agency come so late in the game? Many are surprised that it is only beginning its formation now. Moez Doraid, Deputy Executive Director of UNIFEM, links this delay to the status of women worldwide.

DORAID: In the same way as the status of women in nearly all countries of the world has been repressed or obstructed, perhaps that has also happened institutionally within the UN.

NARR: Paula Donovan agrees.

DONNOVAN: What we've seen basically is that the United Nations is kind of a throwback, it's in the dark ages as far as equality for women is concerned, so there is a tremendous amount of residual sexism, it's a very male-dominated entity and structure in itself. So it's an entire atavistic system dominated by men who honestly can't see the concerns that women have because they have gender blinders on.

NARR: Donovan sees potential for an agency with a lot of funding to remove these blinders, not just in the UN's aid to outside countries, but within the structure itself.

DONN: If you had a women's agency as you have say a children's agency, with people who are experts in various areas that touch on women's lives, who are constantly to attention of to the people who are making the policies and designing the programs that we had to look at things from women's perspective, we could change the entire culture of the United Nations."

NARR: Dr. Charli Carpenter is a professor at UMASS Amherst, who sees a great deal of potential in the creation of a large gender entity.

CARPENTER: But it's important to recognize the difference between establishing a beauracracy and providing it with the resources that will enable it to fulfill its mandate.

NARR: In the UN presently, she sees what she calls the 'women's issues approach':

CARPENTER: "The women's issues approach would focus on women and girls as a specific category of the population. This approach also focuses more attention and resources on half of the population. A more radical approach is to take the concept of gender and use it as a means of evaluating and strengthening all UN policies. This perspective acknowledges that a big part of what holds women and girls back is not overt discrimination by men, but rather constructions of masculinity and femininity that women also buy into.

NARR: Doraid acknowledges this argument stating that the new agency would work to both target women and look at gender as a whole to create effective policy.

DORAID: The new agency needs to do both - both promote gender equality as well as women's empowerment.

NARR: What direction this new agency will take, if implemented, is still to be seen. It will be up to the member states of the General Assembly, who will be voting on a resolution on its implementation in September. This is Farah Ahmed, for UN Radio.

duration: 4'15"