A lack of women at decision-making tables around the world is hindering progress when it comes to tackling conflicts or improving health and standard of living, the highest ranking woman in the UN has said.
“We’re half the population. And what we bring to the table is incredibly important and it’s missing,” said Amina Mohammed, the United Nations deputy secretary general. “I think it’s why mostly our human development indices are so bad, why we have so many conflicts and we’re unable to come out of the conflicts.”
Since her appointment in 2017, Mohammed has been a constant voice in pushing back against the under-representation of women in politics, diplomacy and even the UN general assembly. Her efforts have helped cast a spotlight on the fact that women remain relegated to the margins of power around the world; last year the global proportion of female lawmakers stood at 26.9%, according to Switzerland’s Inter-Parliamentary Union.
Speaking to the Guardian, Mohammed said “flexing muscle and testosterone” often dominated at tables of power around the world.
“This win, win, win at all costs – I think that would change if women were at the table,” she said.
She was swift to acknowledge that the world had seen a handful of female leaders who had not used their position to advocate for greater peace or conflict resolution.
“Fair point, we see women in power and they’re sometimes the image of men,” she said. But she described it as unfair to judge women on an individual basis while they were still within the confines of a system that was dominated by men. “We don’t judge men that way.”
Her remarks come in a year when more people are set to vote than ever before, but in which female candidates are in noticeably short supply. Of the 42 countries where elections will be held this year, only a handful have female candidates with a reasonable chance of winning.
Some of these elections have already proven to be bright spots when it comes to women’s representation; earlier this month, Iceland elected the entrepreneur Halla Tómasdóttir as president, while in Mexico, the leftwing climate scientist Claudia Sheinbaum recently became the country’s first female president.
While Iceland has a long tradition of electing women to office, Mohammed said she had been surprised by Mexico, “where you can have a macho community, but you are seeing strong women get into office”, she said. “And then Europe, we thought we would have more. Why not? It’s a little strange, isn’t it?”
Analysts have long pointed to a variety of factors, from rocketing levels of online abuse to sexual harassment, to explain women’s lagging political participation in Europe and beyond. In the lead-up to the EU elections, rights campaigners warned that a surge in support for the far right could see fewer women elected to office as these parties tended to focus less on gender balance.
Mohammed highlighted another reason for women’s under-representation, pointing to the many parts of society who saw women in power as “about taking away, rather than adding” value, she said. “And we have to change that mentality.”
When it came to bolstering the number of women at these tables, however, the decades of slow progress suggested that the current approach was falling short, she said.
“We kept looking at the band-aid: put the women in office, let’s have affirmative action. And we never connected the dots for women themselves to build the constituencies and to go out and vote,” she said. “So we have to have a conversation with women first. Because if we’re doing this for women, should it not be by women? I think we’ve missed that piece because we got on the bandwagon of feminism and parity … we left the base behind.”
Her call for a rethink is backed by the increasingly dire situation many women are facing around the world. Last year, the UN’s secretary general, António Guterres, described global progress on women’s rights as “vanishing before our eyes”, citing the erasure of women from public life in Afghanistan and the many places where women’s sexual and reproductive rights were being rolled back. “Gender equality is growing more distant,” he warned. “On the current track, UN Women puts it 300 years away.”
