By Ramu Damodaran
As June draws to a close, the United Nations marks two important anniversaries: the signing of its Charter on June 26, 1945, and the establishment of the full-fledged Commission on the Status of Women on June 21, 1946. And now we have another landmark date right between the two, the International Day of Women in Diplomacy, proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly, to fall on June 24 each year.
We have clearly come a long way since the first years of the U.N. when even someone as universally known and respected as Eleanor Roosevelt was primly listed in documents as "Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt" rather than by her own name. That said, less than 22 percent of the permanent representatives at the United Nations today are women. Thanks to strenuous efforts by the organization, almost a quarter of conflict party delegations in the U.N.-supported peace processes ― diplomacy at its truest testing ― were women in 2020, an impressive rise from the earlier figure of 13 percent, but still far from compelling.
And it was not until 1992 that the U.N. appointed the first woman head of a peacekeeping operation, Margaret Anstee of the United Kingdom. Her ironically titled memoir, "Never learn to type," made clear how instinctively women were considered as limited to secretarial positions even in an organization that prided itself on gender equality.
That pride did not come easily. And much is owed to a mind that would challenge and change the Charter of the U.N. itself, as it was being drafted. Bertha Maria Julia Lutz was a naturalist at the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro (she has three frog and two lizard species named after her); she brought her academic precision and impatience with implication to the 1945 San Francisco conference that authored the Charter where she successfully negotiated the insertion of the critical words, "and women," in its stirring preamble: "faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and nations large and small."
Three years later, as the Universal Declaration on Human Rights was being drafted, it was an Indian delegate, Hansa Mehta, who won a change in the wording from, "All men are born free and equal," in its first article to, "All human beings are born free and equal."
Even then, as late as 1979, when William H. Barton, Canada's permanent representative to the U.N. met Pope John Paul II during his visit to the world body and was accompanied by a lady; the U.N. official in attendance instinctively introduced them to the Pope as husband and wife; she was, in fact, Flora MacDonald, Canada's minister for external affairs.
And when, 16 years later, the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women Declaration affirmed in one unequivocal paragraph that "women's rights are human rights," it gave voice to the truth that in the advancement of these specific rights, all human rights would be furthered, not fragmented, as all great revolutions of the spirit and mind have been able to, elevating the aspirations realized by a demographic group which had hitherto been denied to that of a truly integrated society as a whole.
To return to women in diplomacy, the success of the negotiations in Beijing led to implementable actions at the national level; within a month of the conference, the Republic of Korea adopted a quota system for female civil servants. And, as the director of the U.N. University Institute for Natural Resources in Africa, Dr. Fatima Denton, has said, "Problems that women face are not always limited to women."
By nature, women think of their whole community. In search of solutions that would result in more gender equality and greater empowerment, it is very important that women and men are not pitted against each other but are seen as part of a group."
Speaking at the Incheon Global Campus last December, the Indian ambassador in Seoul, Sripriya Ranganathan (an outstanding career diplomat, and not just a woman career diplomat, of her generation) defined diplomacy as "the art of letting someone else have your way."
It is a way that can be literal as much as metaphorical; when Korea Ambassador to the U.K. Park Eun-ha in London secured Britain's consent to allow Korean citizens to enter the country through "E-Passport" gates, her accomplishment reflected the heart of what diplomacy, and indeed the U.N., is all about: the ability to work, to converse, to laugh, together, without the jealousies of geography ― or, indeed, of gender.
Ramu Damodaran is a senior fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress, New Delhi, India. He served as the first director of the United Nations Academic Impact, an initiative linking universities around the world with the United Nations.
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We have clearly come a long way since the first years of the U.N. when even someone as universally known and respected as Eleanor Roosevelt was primly listed in documents as "Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt" rather than by her own name. That said, less than 22 percent of the permanent representatives at the United Nations today are women. Thanks to strenuous efforts by the organization, almost a quarter of conflict party delegations in the U.N.-supported peace processes ― diplomacy at its truest testing ― were women in 2020, an impressive rise from the earlier figure of 13 percent, but still far from compelling.
And it was not until 1992 that the U.N. appointed the first woman head of a peacekeeping operation, Margaret Anstee of the United Kingdom. Her ironically titled memoir, "Never learn to type," made clear how instinctively women were considered as limited to secretarial positions even in an organization that prided itself on gender equality.
That pride did not come easily. And much is owed to a mind that would challenge and change the Charter of the U.N. itself, as it was being drafted. Bertha Maria Julia Lutz was a naturalist at the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro (she has three frog and two lizard species named after her); she brought her academic precision and impatience with implication to the 1945 San Francisco conference that authored the Charter where she successfully negotiated the insertion of the critical words, "and women," in its stirring preamble: "faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and nations large and small."
Three years later, as the Universal Declaration on Human Rights was being drafted, it was an Indian delegate, Hansa Mehta, who won a change in the wording from, "All men are born free and equal," in its first article to, "All human beings are born free and equal."
Even then, as late as 1979, when William H. Barton, Canada's permanent representative to the U.N. met Pope John Paul II during his visit to the world body and was accompanied by a lady; the U.N. official in attendance instinctively introduced them to the Pope as husband and wife; she was, in fact, Flora MacDonald, Canada's minister for external affairs.
And when, 16 years later, the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women Declaration affirmed in one unequivocal paragraph that "women's rights are human rights," it gave voice to the truth that in the advancement of these specific rights, all human rights would be furthered, not fragmented, as all great revolutions of the spirit and mind have been able to, elevating the aspirations realized by a demographic group which had hitherto been denied to that of a truly integrated society as a whole.
To return to women in diplomacy, the success of the negotiations in Beijing led to implementable actions at the national level; within a month of the conference, the Republic of Korea adopted a quota system for female civil servants. And, as the director of the U.N. University Institute for Natural Resources in Africa, Dr. Fatima Denton, has said, "Problems that women face are not always limited to women."
By nature, women think of their whole community. In search of solutions that would result in more gender equality and greater empowerment, it is very important that women and men are not pitted against each other but are seen as part of a group."
Speaking at the Incheon Global Campus last December, the Indian ambassador in Seoul, Sripriya Ranganathan (an outstanding career diplomat, and not just a woman career diplomat, of her generation) defined diplomacy as "the art of letting someone else have your way."
It is a way that can be literal as much as metaphorical; when Korea Ambassador to the U.K. Park Eun-ha in London secured Britain's consent to allow Korean citizens to enter the country through "E-Passport" gates, her accomplishment reflected the heart of what diplomacy, and indeed the U.N., is all about: the ability to work, to converse, to laugh, together, without the jealousies of geography ― or, indeed, of gender.
Ramu Damodaran is a senior fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress, New Delhi, India. He served as the first director of the United Nations Academic Impact, an initiative linking universities around the world with the United Nations.
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