Gender equality
The Department for General Assembly and Conference Management is deeply committed to ensuring gender equality, empowering women and creating a more inclusive workplace for all staff, and it is taking steps towards achieving these goals within the context of its own mandate.
In recent years, the Department has achieved gender parity in its workforce at all levels thanks to the strong commitment of its leadership and to the implementation of a number of gender strategies and action plans in its various duty stations.
Action plans on gender equality and the empowerment of women
Since 2016, the Department for General Assembly and Conference Management in New York has implemented annual action plans on gender equality and the empowerment of women. They have been focused on achieving the following objectives by adopting the following measures, among others:
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Objectives |
Measures |
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Increasing managers’ accountability towards reaching and maintaining gender parity and creating a more inclusive workplace for staff of all genders |
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Ongoing monitoring of the representation of women and men in the Department |
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Improving the organizational culture by mitigating unconscious bias, countering gender stereotypes and promoting gender quality and inclusion |
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Strengthening the female talent pipeline by providing women with career development, training and networking opportunities |
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Promoting the use of gender-inclusive language within the Department and with other departments in the United Nations system |
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Raising awareness of gender issues |
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The action plans have been developed in line with organizational policies, strategies and guidance on achieving gender equality and parity goals, and building a more diverse and inclusive organization, such as the System-wide Strategy on Gender Parity, and the and their .
The sets out measures such as including gender-smart goals or actions in staff members' work plans; organizing training such as sessions on implicit bias and gender stereotyping coaching on leadership, communication and negotiation skills for female staff, and discussions on women in leadership.
Promoting the use of gender-inclusive language in the United Nations system
The Department has greatly contributed to the United Nations gender equality goals from a linguistic perspective, one of the departmental areas of expertise, in accordance with its mandate to mainstream multilingualism, as a core value of the Organization, into the activities of the Secretariat.
As part of an inter-agency project with the Department of Global Communications, the Department of Management Strategy, Policy and Compliance, the Department of Operational Support and the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN-Women), the Department for General Assembly and Conference Management in New York has developed gender-inclusive language guidelines and related training materials and resources in the six official languages. The guidelines and materials are aimed at helping United Nations staff to communicate in a gender-inclusive way in the six official languages of the Organization. They are available through a multilingual website (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish).
In addition, the Department for General Assembly and Conference Management in New York has produced an information circular on the use of gender-inclusive language addressed to members of the staff, which is currently under review and will be promulgated soon.
Reporting on gender equality: UN-SWAP
The Department reports annually on gender equality through the United Nations System-wide Action Plan on Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (, now in its version 2.0). UN-SWAP is the Organization's accountability framework for accelerating the mainstreaming of gender equality and the empowerment of women in all institutional functions of the entities of the United Nations system. It measures entity and departmental performance against 17 common performance indicators.
The Department for General Assembly and Conference Management in New Yorksubmits a stand-alone report, whereas the Department in Geneva, Nairobi and Vienna report under the United Nations Offices at Geneva, Nairobi and Vienna, respectively.
In recent years, the Department for General Assembly and Conference Management in New York has greatly increased its performance for indicators such as policy, gender architecture and parity, organizational culture, capacity assessment and development, knowledge communication and coherence.
For more information on the reporting results for the Department for General Assembly and Conference Management in New York, see:
Participation in gender networks
The Department is an active member of institutional networks on gender equality, such as the United Nations Gender Focal Points and UN-SWAP networks and the Inter-Agency Network on Women and Gender Equality (IANWGE). This involves providing input to institutional policies and strategies and continuously exchanging lessons learned and best practices with other entities.
The Under-Secretary-General for General Assembly and Conference Management is a member of the network.