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For more than a century, March 8 has marked International Women's Day-a global day celebrating the achievements of women and promoting gender equality worldwide. But as we pause to celebrate our many advances, we must also acknowledge how much remains to be done.
Two interconnected issues have emerged as priorities over the past two years sexual harassment at the workplace and obstacles to women's participation at all levels of the workforce, including political representation. The 2017-18 explosion of the #MeToo movement across social media uncovered countless cases of unreported sexual harassment and assault, first in the U.S. and then in India. In both countries, it led to the resignations or firing of dozens of prominent men, mostly politicians, actors and journalists.
It also prompted a range of public and private organisations to examine the internal institutional cultures surrounding sexual harassment, gender parity, and gender equity. Amongst them, the United Nations.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres has been a staunch supporter of women's rights since his election in 2016, stating the need for "benchmarks and time frames to achieve parity across the system, well before the target year of 2030". In September 2017, the UN released a System-wide Strategy on Gender Parity to transform the UN's representation of women at senior levels. Today the UN's Senior Management Group, which has 44 top UN employees, comprises 23 women and 21 men.
In response to the MeToo movement, the UN recently conducted a system-wide survey to gauge the prevalence of sexual harassment among its more than 200,000 global staff. Though only 17% of UN staff responded, what the survey uncovered was sobering. One in three UN women workers reported being sexually harassed in the past two years, predominantly by men. Clearly, the UN gender strategy has much to improve, but then the UN, like most other international and national organisations, has a decades-old cultural backlog to tackle.