Women Who Work at the U. N. : Sexual Equality Not Yet a Reality at World Organization

When former Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane J. Kirkpatrick was breaking into the job four years ago, she noticed something strange.

“If I went across the street to a meeting at headquarters with high-level officials, I seemed to be the only woman in the room,” Kirkpatrick remarked while talking with reporters shortly before she left her post earlier this year. “I also noticed something else: They all got paid more than I did.”

A Novel Principle

Although the United Nations was founded 40 years ago with the then-novel principle of sexual equality enshrined in its charter, practice remained largely divorced from theory in the early days of the world organization. And in the view of women U. N. employees, not much has changed in 40 years of operation.

It was not until 1971 that a woman, Helvi Sippila of Finland, was appointed as an assistant secretary-general. Even when the International Decade of Women was officially launched 10 years ago, there were only three female cabinet-level officials--those with the rank of assistant secretary-general and undersecretary-general.

This year, as thousands of delegates gather in Nairobi to review the progress of that decade’s effort, there are only four women assistant secretaries-general, compared to 26 men who hold this rank and receive the $107,089 salary that goes with it. And all the 25 undersecretaries-general, who are paid $121,046, are male.

As for the top job of secretary-general, which pays $163,300 and includes a mansion on New York’s East Side among its fringe benefits, no woman has ever so much as been nominated. Javier Perez de Cuellar, the current secretary-general, took office in 1981 with a pledge to liberalize the organization, but progress has been marginal, said Nadia Younes, a young Egyptian press officer to the United Nations who is vice president of an ad hoc group of staff employees advocating equal rights for women.

In 1975, Younes said, 396 women served in professional posts, whose salaries range from $22,315 to $90,606. “They were 16% of the nearly 2,500 professional staff,” she said. “By 1980, there were 527 women in this group but, because the overall number had gone up, they were only 18.9%. As of last August, the number of women was up to 699 and that was 22.6%.

While Younes acknowledged the improvement, she said the women are concentrated in the lower professional grades. At the level just below assistant secretary-general, where basic pay ranges from $83,262 to $90,606, the number of women grew from three in 1971 to four last year, Younes said. But because the number of men at that level grew at a faster rate, the percentage of women at that level declined from 4.8% to 4.4%.

Widespread Resistance

“We really feel Mr. Perez de Cuellar is committed to improving the situation, but the problem is with his senior advisers and middle management,” Younes said. “This is one issue where there is no East-West or North-South differences. We get as much resistance from American men as from Soviet or African men.”

Women at the United Nations are placing their hopes in the appointment last April of a Venezuelan, Mercedes Pulido de Briceno, to serve as coordinator for the improvement of the status of women in the U.N. Secretariat. A 45-year-old professor who has served for five years as Venezuela’s minister for the promotion and participation of women, Pulido de Briceno says she has started to draft an action program to raise the number of women in the professional ranks.

In the end, Pulido de Briceno acknowledged, the member states of the world organization must support the employment of women, and she plans to meet with the budget committee of the General Assembly this fall to plead her case. The statistics present a bleak prospect. Of the 159 member states, only two have women as heads of their delegations--Edmonde Devers of Belgium and Giovinella Gonthier of the Seychelle Islands--compared with a dozen women ambassadors when the U. N. membership was smaller a decade ago.