The UN General Assembly is the ultimate 'manel'

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September 23, 2020

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Hillary Clinton has a new podcast, Betsy DeVos faces an ethics investigation, and the UN General Assembly begins without addresses from any female leaders. Have a wonderful Wednesday.

– The ultimate manel. If a ‘manel’ is an all-male panel, what’s the term for a full day of the UN General Assembly that features no women speakers? Words escape me.

The first day of the virtual general assembly on Tuesday featured formal speeches by 32 male leaders and none by women. The first woman to address the meeting of world leaders will be Slovakia President Zuzana Čaputová this morning; she’s speaker No. 50 or so. President Jeanine Añez Chávez of Bolivia is also scheduled to deliver an address this afternoon.

The UN reportedly makes the schedule on a first-come, first-serve basis, but it’s not as if the gender make-up of the speakers evens out later on. PassBlue, a publication that covers the UN, reported earlier this month that of the 196 speakers at this year’s general assembly, just 11 are women. Several member states reportedly tried to swap the order of speakers to address the lack of women on Day 1, but to no avail.

The speaker line-up essentially tells us what we already know; that the number of women among world leaders remains extraordinarily low. This year, there are 22 female heads of government representing the 193 UN member states.

But the optics are especially bad this year, since UN Secretary General António Guterres has publicly touted his dedication to gender equality; since so many female leaders have earned plaudits for their handling of the pandemic that continues to devastate; since the UN’s own research shows the pandemic is exerting a disproportionately high toll on the world’s women.

“The UN…should be a leading example in terms of representation and inclusion,” said Isabel Saint Malo, former vice president of Panama. “However, what we see at the UN is parallel to representation in other spaces.”

Claire Zillman
claire.zillman@fortune.com
@clairezillman

Today’s Broadsheet was curated by Emma Hinchliffe. 

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