Dame Margaret Anstee grew accustomed to accusations that she was a prostitute and to being mistaken for her male deputy’s secretary. She doesn’t hold it against anyone: There weren’t many women diplomats at the United Nations when she started work there in 1952.
“Diplomacy was a bastion of male chauvinism — it had never been done any other way when I started my career,” said Anstee, now 88, in a phone interview. “Men were just getting accustomed to having us around as peers.”
There’s no longer any room for excuses about excluding women, said Anstee, one of the UK’s first female diplomats, who led 11 UN operations around the world and in 1992 became the first woman to head a UN peacekeeping mission, in Angola.
While women diplomats are still far from a majority at the UN, they have reached a critical mass. A record one third of the members of the UN Security Council, the organisation’s most powerful body, are represented by women. Thirty of the UN’s 193 members have female ambassadors — also the most since the international body was created in 1945.
In the preamble to its charter that year, the UN asserted its determination “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women.” The world body has been slow to live up to that lofty mission, say some of the women diplomats who have served there. Instead, they say, they’ve been subject to the same slights and exclusions as their counterparts in other fields.
Still, reaching the “long overdue” milestone at the Security Council provides potential for further advancement of women’s issues worldwide, particularly in the realm of national security, said Melanne Verveer, President Barack Obama’s former ambassador for global women’s issues.
“We have looked upon matters of security through a very masculine mindset” and the UN “is a place that has been dominated by men particularly, certainly in the powerful positions”, said Verveer, executive director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security at Georgetown University in Washington.
More female diplomats at the negotiating table could introduce a perspective their male counterparts may not share, especially when “grappling with policies having to do with war and peace that affect women,” she said. “Not to have that perspective and those experiences bearing on those policies is a great omission.”
While the UN this week wraps up a celebration of the 20th anniversary of a global policy document on gender equality, governments and the Security Council have been slow to lead by example. Not until 2000 did the council adopt a resolution recognizing the importance of women’s participation in conflict resolution and political decision-making.
It has taken 13 years for the council to implement its own resolution and see women in a third of its 15 seats — the critical mass of 30 per cent that the UN has defined as the minimum for full inclusion and articulation of women’s rights in public policy.
Nigeria’s Joy Ogwu and Lithuania’s Raimonda Murmokaite on January 1 began their two-year terms on the Security Council, joining three other female ambassadors: Samantha Power of the US, Maria Cristina Perceval of Argentina and Sylvie Lucas of Luxembourg.
The symbolic importance of this UN milestone is not lost on the Security Council’s “W5,” or “women five” as they’re called by UN diplomats. Power of the US called it both “a reflection of the professional glass ceilings women are breaking around the world” and a means to orient policies to better promote women’s rights and participation.
Ogwu, who previously served as Nigeria’s foreign minister, said that while the W5 recognise their presence, they have yet to “deliberately pull woman power” at the Security Council because of the “dizzying” pace of work on continued crises in Ukraine, Syria, Central African Republic and elsewhere.
The five have yet to meet to discuss women’s issues, she said. “Perhaps when we get to organise ourselves, then we will get to recognise this potential power to ease tensions,” she added.
Having a group of women peers was inconceivable to Anstee, who until the 1980s was always the lone woman in rooms of male diplomats, generals, dictators and UN secretaries-general.
The world has “completely changed” since her time, when a “marriage bar” forced her to leave the British diplomatic corps when she married and governments refused to accept her as the head of a UN mission, “as they believed women were only capable of typing or taking notes”, Anstee said.
An Angolan military leader accused her of going to New York to get a secret abortion while moonlighting as a prostitute, when in fact she’d gone to report to the Security Council on the UN peacekeeping mission she was heading, Anstee said. A Uruguayan official introduced her at a reception as the wife of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, who had never married.
While men at the UN now refrain from such misogynistic approaches, there remains a subtle reserve towards women, according to female diplomats in New York.
“This business was dealt with by men,” said Simona Miculescu, Romania’s ambassador to the UN. “No wonder you have terms like ‘gentlemen’s agreement.’ Always, the serious business — the state issues, everything — was dealt with by men, so they are not yet used to treating us as equals.”
Until you get their confidence, they don’t trust you like you would be a man,” Miculescu said. “At receptions, some men are discussing, and when you appear, they may change the subject and instead start complimenting you.”
Nigeria’s Ogwu attested to experiencing similar discreet discrimination, with male diplomats talking over her in meetings she was running — something she said they wouldn’t dare do in meetings led by a man.
“Really, it is subtle, and if you’re sensitive you can easily become a victim,” said Ogwu, a 67-year-old grandmother. “You know it is there, but you have your goals, so you ignore it.”
Kristalina Georgieva, the European Commission’s humanitarian aid commissioner, said she starkly remembers the start of her career as a World Bank economist in 1993, where the few women there dressed only in dark pantsuits to blend in with the men.
“Many senior women attempted to be gender-blind because they don’t want to be pigeonholed and they don’t want the perception that they are where they are because they are women, and not because they are good,” Georgieva said in an interview in New York. “You need a critical mass of women that are not only performing their functions, but are mentoring the next generation of women and putting this gender balance in place.”
Women’s political participation globally has risen to 17.2 per cent of ministerial posts from 16.1 per cent in 2008, and to a record high of 21.8 per cent of all parliamentary seats, the Inter-Parliamentary Union said in a March 11 report, Women in Politics Map 2014.
While it’s clear that more women have entered politics and are influencing the political agenda at higher levels, they’re still not doing so at the highest levels, the organisation’s Secretary General Anders B. Johnsson said in an e-mailed statement.
The number of women heads of state or government declined to 18 from 19 in 2012, according to the group. The percentage of women speakers of parliament saw a minuscule increase to 14.8 per cent last year from 14.2 per cent in 2012, though the data for deputy speakers of parliament were significantly higher at 26.5 per cent, “suggesting that this is often the glass ceiling for women members of parliament,” Johnsson said.
All the women interviewed for this story said that balancing work and family lives is the biggest challenge young female diplomats face.
“If somebody tells you that there is no cost, don’t buy it,” said Georgieva. “The one regret that I would always carry with me is the birthdays with my daughter that I missed and family reunions that I was not present at.”
“I certainly hope that for the future generation of women, that sacrifice will not be necessary, but we are the generation that had to pave the way for women to be taken as equals, and to be equal we actually had to do more,” she said.
Power, who at 43 is the youngest-ever US envoy to the UN, attests to the challenge.
“You never feel like you’re bringing your A-game to everything at the same time,” she said in an October interview with NBC’s Today Show about the difficulty of juggling her role as a mother of two young children and her cabinet-rank job.
Romania’s Miculescu said that for unmarried young women in the diplomatic corps, finding a spouse and starting a family is the biggest challenge in a profession that requires international moves every two to three years.
She remains inspired by this year’s record number of women and says she hopes it’s is not a statistical blip but the start of a long-overdue trend. As part of that effort, Miculescu seeks to build on an informal initiative she started in 2011 with former Irish and Bahamanian envoys Anne Anderson and Paulette Bethel.
The Women Diplomats Network brings together all the female diplomats at the UN several times a year to meet women who are leaders such as former International Criminal Court prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos.
About 40 gathered at the network’s first 2014 event on March 5, smiling over one women’s pregnant belly and chatting about the latest General Assembly meetings over mini-cupcakes and baklava.
Junior diplomats from the US, Brunei and New Zealand asked the guest speaker, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the UN’s top official on gender equality, how women can make their voices heard among men and tell whether one has been denied a promotion because of gender.
One piece of advice Mlambo-Ngcuka, a 58-year-old mother of five and former South African deputy president, gave: Never let your work overwhelm your personal life.
“You’re never going to look back and think, ‘That was the most amazing negotiation I ever had in my life!’” Mlambo-Ngcuka said. “Spend more time with your children and your family. That’s what will stay with your for the rest of your life.”
— Bloomberg
