The dashboard is a cooperative effort between NYU Center on International Cooperation and NYU Center for Global Affairs
UN Senior Appointments Dashboard tracks diversity at the leadership level for the United Nations, collating information about appointments of its most senior leaders since 1996, tracking various measures of diversity including gender, national origin, age, and educational background.
User notes
- The dashboard compiles data on ASG, USG, or DSG levels (assistant secretaries-general, under-secretaries-general, and deputy secretaries-general). The data is drawn from official press releases of senior appointments from the un.org website and other sources. While based on the best available information it may be incomplete in some categories.
- The press releases do not include appointments for UN Specialized Agencies and Related Organizations, so these are not currently included in our database.
- We include all appointments for which there are press releases, including so-called $1/year appointments (e.g., certain special advisors, etc.). For this reason, there are higher numbers for USGs and ASGs in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General than simply HQ staff. In the future, we hope to separate these categories of appointments out.
- We categorize all senior leaders associated with political missions, good offices, and peace operations with the department managing that operation: Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA) for political missions and good offices and Department of Peace Operations (DPO) for peace operations. Other thematic and geographic special and personal representatives, envoys, and advisors were grouped with the Executive Office of the Secretary-General (EOSG).
- Countries with no appointments in the database are greyed out on the map and cannot be selected. If you have information on a USG/ASG appointment for one of these countries, please contact nyu.cic@gmail.com
- Please find a detailed methodology here.
Watch the launch of the UN Senior Leadership Dashboard on Youtube here and hear from a panel of former leaders of UN peacekeeping missions, current USGs, researchers, and the ambassadors of Ghana and the State of Qatar, co-chairs of the Group of Friends of Gender Parity who discuss the implications of the findings from the dashboard.
Latest Updates and Press
- CIC Blog: 2023 UN Senior Appointments: Have We Made Progress?, July 2023
- CIC Blog: UN Senior Appointments Dashboard: Looking Back at 2020, April 2021
- UNA-UK: A more representive UN?, December 2020
- CIC Blog: Senior Appointments at the UN: Using Data for Greater Transparency, June 2020
- Devex: Number of UN women leaders grew under Guterres, with some caveats, October 2020
- Christian Science Monitor: “Where are the women?’ At the UN, now there’s an answer, October 2020
- Announcement: Launch of the UN Senior Appointments Dashboard, October 2020
- Passblue: Leadership of UN Missions: Halting Progress on the Road to Gender Parity, September 2020
We are grateful for the support of the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and New York University for this project.
