Tusinder af kvinder rykket ind i NGOernes nøglefunktioner, også ude i felten, men helt til tops, når de sjældent – Not enough women like Valerie Amos, Emergency Relief Coordinator
DAKAR, 15 September 2011 (IRIN): When long-time humanitarian Margie Buchanan-Smith was interviewed for one of her first field posts – in Sudan in the 1980s – she was asked: “Will you burst out crying when you arrive?”
“No,” she replied – and got the job. But when she arrived she was one of few women on the ground, and was always questioned if she was up to it.
Things have moved on since then: There are thousands of women working at all levels of the humanitarian sector, but when it comes to the top positions, at least in Western international NGOs and particularly in the field, staff are too often white and male, said humanitarian leaders IRIN spoke to.
This is also the conclusion of a 2011 ALNAP (Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action) study on humanitarian leadership.
IRIN spoke to NGO staff whose headquarters were respectively in the UK, Johannesburg and Geneva, as well as to staff at headquarters in the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the UN World Food Programme (WFP).
Proactive schemes to diversify leadership help, say practitioners, but do not tackle the heart of the problem: a workaholic culture that is not conducive to families, and in some cases, latent discrimination against national staff and women.
Gender parity in leadership at the field and HQ levels is a long way off, but NGO headquarters tend to be better at it. When it comes to national staff leadership, UN agencies perform better than NGOs, according to individual agencies and ALNAP.
Among UN agencies and international NGOs, some do better on gender parity than others. Oxfam GB and Care International’s humanitarian management lines are all-female; 41 and 43 percent of UNICEF’s and ActionAid’s senior staff, respectively, are women; and four of ActionAid’s six directors are female.
Statistics on national staff who have made it to top positions in the humanitarian sector are not available, but according to interviewees, are low outside the UN.
Benefits of diversity
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