UN Women

Gender Parity in Upper-Level UN Jobs Remains Elusive

• December 14, 2012

This year, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has so far appointed 55 people to high-level positions. Twelve of the appointees, nearly 22 percent, are women, filling roles like the special representative for children and armed conflict and the executive director of the World Food Program. Some of the people Ban appointed include Zainab Hawa …

General Assembly, Secretary-General, Women

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Chilean Voters Want Michelle Bachelet Back Home

Barbara Crossette

• December 5, 2012

A series of opinion polls in recent months in Chile show that Michelle Bachelet, the executive director of UN Women, is still the most popular Chilean politician three years after her four-year term as the country’s president ended. Reports from Chile say that across the political spectrum, party officials are assuming she will be …

Women

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In the Mideast, Women’s Hopes Give Way to Harsh Realities

Barbara Crossette

• November 1, 2012

Overshadowed by daily reports from a horrific war in Syria, lingering violence in Libya and sporadic protests in Egypt and other regional nations, a struggle to salvage and advance the rights of women caught up in the revolutions of the Arab Spring is reaching a crucial stage. Women who joined men in the streets, …

Middle East, Women

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For Muslim Women, a Careful Script to Combat Violence

Barbara Crossette

• September 17, 2012

The saddest stories told by vulnerable women in villages or slum shacks across the developing world most often involve violence or subjugation that they must bear because they don’t know how, or don’t have the means, to escape a bad situation. In the poorest countries, women talk of being assaulted or intimidated at home, …

Gender Violence, Middle East, Women

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SPECIAL REPORT

How Bad Is It? The UN Development System Needs an Overhaul

Dulcie Leimbach

• July 17, 2012

The clamor for United Nations reform has not stopped since its first days in 1945. Although ideas for changing the UN rise and fall each year, the newest calls for an overhaul involve development, one of the largest sectors of the world body’s system. With a Kafkaesque bureaucracy consisting of at least 30 agencies …

Development, Special Report

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MILLENNIUM GOALS

Promoting Women Starts Early, in First Grade

Barbara Crossette

• July 9, 2012

With only three years left to reach an ambitious global deadline, tracking the eight Millennium Development Goals often seems like going around in circles. Perhaps no goal is better evidence of this than Goal 3: promote gender equality and empower women. So often does the empowerment of women, in one way or another, figure …

Millennium Goals, Women

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Misogyny Resurfaces, Everywhere

Dulcie Leimbach

• June 4, 2012

As the first United Nations agency for women struggles for more sweeping support from governments, and advocates raise alarms that another international conference on women would be more dangerous than helpful to the cause, women in the United States also find themselves defending their rights as politics erode gains that have been made in …

Gender Violence, Women

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Easing Afghan Women’s Burdens With a Hotline

Jenny Marc

• April 19, 2012

Sanjar Qiam can readily recite examples of domestic abuse in his country, Afghanistan. “Just last week we received a call from neighbors,” Qiam, the director of a Kabul-based communications business, Gandeeray, recalled in a phone interview from his home in London, where he moved a few months ago. “‘There is a family,’ they said. …

Asia, Gender Violence, Women

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UN Leaders Call for a Global Review of Women’s Rights

Barbara Crossette

• March 14, 2012

In an unusual joint call for action, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the president of the General Assembly, Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser of Qatar, are asking United Nations members to convene a world conference on women in 2015, the 20th anniversary of the path-breaking meeting in Beijing that broadly defined women’s rights and proposed actions to …

General Assembly, Women

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Nations Are Failing to Support UN Women Financially

Barbara Crossette

• October 15, 2011

The world is letting down the newest and most promising agency created by the United Nations to raise the status of women, a key to more effective antipoverty programs and economic development. When UN Women was created by the General Assembly in July 2010, there were high hopes that it would have a …