Race Against Time: Searching for Hope in AIDS-Ravaged Africa by Stephen Lewis

Author:Stephen Lewis [Lewis, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Political Science, Social Science, Public Policy, Social Services & Welfare, Human Services, World, POL000000
ISBN: 9780887848759
Publisher: House of Anansi
Published: 2006-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

IV

WOMEN: HALF THE WORLD, BARELY REPRESENTED

ON THE WALL of my study at home, there hangs a picture which I value highly, albeit in a somewhat perverse fashion. It’s a stunning photograph of the entire leadership of the United Nations secretariat in 1985. The Secretary-General of the time was Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, surrounded by all of his Under-Secretaries-General and all of his Assistant Secretaries-General. They’re standing in a resplendent, unbroken row on the podium of the General Assembly, immediately beneath the huge and ornate representation of the logo of the United Nations.

There are thirty-two of them in all. Not one woman. Not one. It was 1985, a mere twenty years ago.

That just about says everything there is to say about multilateralism and gender. I was Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations at the time, and with the full encouragement of the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I pursued a very tough line on discrimination against women within the UN system, as well as worldwide gender discrimination on every front.

It was actually quite comical at times. On several occasions, after a series of sturdy speeches making the point, over and over again, that the denial of opportunities for women in the United Nations was appalling, some of my closest diplomatic colleagues would take me to task, cautioning me that Canada was driving the nail through the wall on this particular issue. They’d inelegantly corner me in a corridor, and say something to the effect of “enough already.” I would reply, with pugnacious bravado, that I wasn’t prepared to cease and desist until equality was achieved (absurd suggestion though that was).

The Canadian badgering, however, was not without value. In the 1980s, the Secretary-General actually defied the protocol of the Boys’ Club and appointed a woman, Mercedes Pulido de Briceño of Venezuela, at the level of Assistant Secretary-General, as Coordinator for the Improvement of the Status of Women in the secretariat, to oversee the rights, treatment, and promotion of female employees. The position lasted but three years, from 1985 to 1988. Little of tangible note was accomplished, but it did lead to a collaboration on women’s issues with the then Assistant Secretary-General for Human Resources Management, a fellow named Kofi Annan. I think it fair to say that he was the only male member of the secretariat with whom I worked who cared one whit about access and opportunities for women within the United Nations.

It was just prior to Kofi Annan’s ascension to the human resources post that Pérez de Cuéllar summoned me to his quarters to say that he had decided to ask Canada to fill a vacant Under-Secretary-General’s position in the Department of Public Information, and he and his staff were making the offer to Canada specifically because they were confident we’d appoint a woman.

We did. (Although therein lies a tale. When I exultantly phoned the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to say that Canada would be leading this breakthrough on gender, and to ask whom we might appoint, they had not a single candidate in reserve.

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