Leadership and the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda

In September 2017, UN secretary-general António Guterres launched a strategy to achieve a long-overdue goal of gender parity among staff across the United Nations (UN). This event examines progress in meeting this goal with a specific focus on challenges to increasing women in the senior leadership roles in the UN’s peace and security institutions, and we discuss why this goal is important for the quality of the UN’s efforts to resolve conflict and build peace.

What are the challenges to increasing women in the senior leadership roles in the UN’s peace and security institutions?

The event is also the occasion for the launch of the UN Senior Appointments Dashboard, a resource created by the NYU Center for International Cooperation and the NYU Center for Global Affairs to track historical trends by gender, national origin, and other characteristics, in the UN’s top appointments—and changes to current appointments in real time. Preliminary findings from the dashboard will be shared.

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, will discuss the implications of the findings. Co-hosted by the NYU Center on International Cooperation, the NYU Center for Global Affairs, the Permanent Mission of the State of Qatar to the United Nations, and the Permanent Mission of Ghana to the United Nations.

SPEAKERS:

H.E. Ambassador Alya Ahmed bin Saif Al-Thani, Permanent Representative of the State of Qatar to the United Nations in New York

H.E. Martha A. Pobee, Permanent Representative of the Republic of Ghana to the United Nations

Jean-Pierre Lacroix, Under-Secretary-General, Department of Peace Operations

Karin Landgren, Executive Director, Security Council Report

Ameerah Haq, former Special Representative of the Secretary-General

Nicholas Haysom, Special Advisor to the Secretary-General for Sudan

Anita Bhatia, Deputy Executive Director, UN Women

Paige Arthur, Deputy Director, NYU Center for International Cooperation

Paul von Chamier, NYU Center for International Cooperation

Foteini Papagioti, NYU Center for Global Affairs

Moderated by Anne Marie Goetz, Clinical Professor, NYU Center for Global Affairs