During the Beijing Conference – as during its preparations – staff of the United Nations Secretariat could be seen but hardly ever heard. They were omnipresent but could have passed off as passive observers. If officials did speak during the negotiations, it was merely to provide information or answer questions about procedure.

Of course, some United Nations officials, like Gertrude Mongella, Secretary-General of the Conference, or Ismat Kittani, the representative of the UN Secretary-General, as well as those heads of specialized agencies and UN programmes, were audible as they made their statements at the Plenary . But what about the remaining 250 staff members of the UN Secretariat. And what exactly was their role there?

For the 3000 governmental delegates, Beijing was a culmination of a process. They would read the main conference documents, like the 1995 Review and Appraisal of the Implementation of the Nairobi Forward-looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women to the year 2000, or the 1994 World Survey on the Role of Women in Development, or The World’s Women 1995: Trends and Statistics to see the factual basis for the draft Platform for Action. They would study the draft Platform with its many bracketed texts. They would go to meetings where the discussions followed UN procedures, enforced by a chair supported by a committee secretary. Their work would be summarised in a press release and the results of their deliberations would be reflected in drafts carefully taken down from the discussion and translated into the six official languages of the Organization.

All this work was done by the invisible staff members of the United Nations Secretariat. And if the work was not noticed, the Secretariat would have done its job.

That job was to make it relatively easy for Member States to make complex agreements that would satisfy 189 different countries in the relatively short span of 10 working days. If they failed to do so, part of the failure would have been due to the Secretariat. If they succeeded, the Secretariat, silently, shared in the success.

For the 50 years prior to Beijing, there has been a unit in the UN Secretariat supporting government negotiations to establish global norms about advancement of women. It provided the institutional memory of agreements, facts and the basis for agreement. It could defend against backsliding by stating the simple words "this has already been agreed..." Not always visible in the receptions and infrequently seen in public, the international civil servants that supported the Conference assured (within the limits of what governments could agree) its success.

Who are these civil servants? The UN is several things, as can be seen from its Charter. It is governments who, under the model of national sovereignty, rule the Organisation. It is the peoples of those countries who are members, including their NGOs. And, from articles 95-102, it is the international civil service. If there has been one innovation of the twentieth century in public administration, it is the creation of that civil service. Today in the staff of the United Nations, it is a staff of some 15,000 people from almost all of the 189 States members of the United Nations who are beholden in practice to none of those States. It is a staff whose operative norm is to reflect "the highest standard of competence, integrity and efficiency."

Recruited from virtually every profession into which people could be educated, the international civil service constitutes a triumph of multinationalism. Without losing their national identity, each official becomes part of a culture that transcends nationality. Most of the civil servants, according to their own reporting, joined the organization because of its ideals. Their identity is based on the norms set out in international agreements like the Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other normative statements of States.

The civil service is arranged into organizational units with specific functions. One of these in 1995, was the Division for the Advancement of Women, which had been named ex officio, Secretariat of the Conference. With a total establishment of 19 professional posts out of the 10,000 in the Secretariat, augmented for the Conference by an additional 14 posts, the Secretariat was a small part of the whole.

It could trace its origins to the earliest days of the UN when, in 1946, the first chairperson of the new Commission on the Status of Women called for "a United Nations Office of Women's Affairs in the framework of the Secretariat, run by a highly competent woman be established to be the planning center for the work and clearing house for information about the status of women and women's activities. It would give the women all over the world a feeling of satisfaction to have a special office at the Headquarters of the United Nations."

Over the next 49 years, the staff members of the Division for the Advancement of Women, under various names, and headed by only 10 different persons, provided the basis for intergovernmental discussion. It was their task to judge how far it was possible to push the consensus, how to structure agendas so that realistic issues could be discussed, to prepare the reports containing information that was the starting point of discussions, to provide information to non-governmental organisations.

Transferred to Vienna in 1979, the Division underwent an almost complete changeover in personnel. It helped organize the United Nations women’s conference in Nairobi in 1985 and was designated as the secretariat for the Fourth World Conference on Women. It was moved back to New York in 1993, on the eve of the Conference. This time most of the staff moved with the Division.

Under Mrs. Mongella’s general supervision, the staff consisted of a core of career international civil servants from the USA, Germany, Austria, Tanzania, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, the Russian Federation, the Philippines, Haiti, the UK, Canada and Poland. The temporary staff came from Thailand, Jordan, the Gambia, Tanzania, Bangladesh, Nigeria, the Russian Federation, Spain, Kenya, China, Jamaica, Egypt, Argentina, Sweden and Austria. Almost all were women. All were committed. They were lawyers, economists, sociologists, political scientists, demographers, journalists, administrators and secretaries. They included staff who worked for the United Nations for almost thirty years and staff who had just joined the organization. Despite their varied backgrounds they worked comfortably together in teams.

What did they do? A few examples can show their work.

One of the main steps forward at Beijing was to recognise that for women to enjoy their right to equal participation in power and decision-making, they would have to be involved in decision-making in sufficient numbers to make a difference. The Platform in paragraph 192 calls for action by Governments, national bodies, the private sector, political parties, trade unions, employers' organizations, research and academic institutions, subregional and regional bodies and non-governmental and international organizations to take positive action to build a critical mass of women leaders, executives and managers in strategic decision-making positions.

In terms of targets, this critical mass was set by the Economic and Social Council at 30 percent. The introduction of the concept of critical mass and the setting of the target level was a result of work by DAW.

Women’s equal right to vote and hold public office has been recognised since the beginning of the United Nations. The first international human rights treaty on women’s equal rights dealt with political rights of women (1952). However, the gap between right and reality continued to be very wide. By the time of the Nairobi Conference, there had been only six women who had been elected heads of State or Government in human history, all since World War II. The proportion of women in parliaments was extremely low. This, despite the fact that women made up over half of the electorates in all countries where voting took place. An important policy question in advancement of women was why this disparity persisted.

In some countries, the question was addressed by simply appointing a number of women to decision-making positions as a matter of quotas. In Eastern Europe, for example, parliaments were supposed to be representative of the population and a certain number of seats were set aside for women, a practice which gave that region the highest average proportions of women in parliament in the world. However, women were virtually absent in the governmental and political party circles where real decisions were taken. Moreover, in most country resistance was faced by any attempts at achiving equality by simply appointing women to positions of power as a matter of quota.

In examining the question, the UN could draw on research which showed that a major reason for women not being elected to public office was that they were not presented as candidates. One reason that they were not put up as candidates was that the largely male political party leaders could argue that women could not win elections, or at least didn’t make any difference in election outcomes. The reason given for this belief was that women themselves did not vote for women, because sex made no difference in political decision-making.

Whenever someone would say that women in power had different approaches than men, particularly on issues of peace and security, the response would be "Hah! Look at Indira Ghandi, Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher!" The three were women heads of government who had led their countries into war.

Confronted with these issues, DAW decided to address the question of participation in terms of "critical mass". (The concept itself derives from nuclear physics and refers to the quantity of plutonium that needs to be brought together to produce a nuclear explosion.)

A number of scholars had begun to speak of the need to reach a "critical mass" of women in decision-making groups. In the mid-1970’s, an American feminist scholar had done a study of the incidence of women in business, looking for sex-based differences. She reviewed studies of the behavior of minorities in task-oriented groups to find out the level of participation that was necessary for the minority members to function effectively as a group to press their interests. The scholar estimated that when the proportion of minority members reached about 30 percent, they were able to influence decision-making by pressing their own interests. At levels lower than that, effectiveness required the minority members to act more like those of the majority and, failing that, they would be ineffective dissenters.

In the 1980’s, these findings were picked up by a Danish feminist political scientist Drude Dahlerup, who argued that the critical mass phenomenon could apply to politics as well. In some countries in Scandinavia, critical mass levels were being approached as some levels of government and it was possible to see whether this made a difference. The concept of critical mass, however, circulated only in feminist scholarly circles. It was not part of the debate at either national or international level in terms of public policy. It fell to the United Nations Secretariat to bring the information into the policy debate.

The Commission on the Status of Women had decided to take up the issue of women and decision-making as a priority theme at its session in 1990. To prepare for it DAW decided to organize an expert group meeting. The Division prepared a paper reviewing what was known about factors that restricted women’s access to decision-making. The staff member responsible for the expert group meeting was Dorota Gierycz, a political scientist from Poland who had been on the Division staff since 1981. She had read Dahlerup’s studies and brought them to my attention. We decided to include in DAW’s paper the finding that a critical mass of at least 30 percent was necessary for women to make an impact on decision-making bodies.

The experts, who were a mix of European and North American academic specialists as well as political leaders from the developing countries (including Gertrude Mongella, then a cabinet minister in Tanzania), took the finding about critical mass and included it in their recommendations. The Division duly reported this and included it also in the report reviewing progress in implementing the Nairobi Strategies. Once the recommendations were endorsed by the Economic and Social Council in the summer of 1990 they became an agreed international norm.

The Secretariat continued to publicize the finding. Dorota Gierycz made a presentation on women and decision-making to the meeting of the International Political Science Association at its convention in Buenos Aires, including the norm of a critical mass. In the UN’s statistical publications on advancement of women, the norm of 30 percent was used as an indicator of progress, including The World’s Women: Trends and Statistics and its 1995 update.

Over the next few years, women’s advocates could refer to the finding in lobbying their own governments to take special measures to increase the proportion of women in decision-making. In several countries, political parties set the norm of 30 percent women into their rules, in several others, constitutional amendments were adopted to give effect to the minimum target.

During the negotiations on the section of the Platform for Action on women in power and decision-making, it was argued by some governments that targets and quotas were not acceptable, or were realistic. The Secretariat representatives could help break the impasse by pointing out that the standard had already been set and that a number of countries had met it.

Another that had impacted women was that of structural adjustments. The relationship between the structural adjustment policies that characterized the 1980’s and early 1990’s and advancement of women had been a highly contentious North-South issue. Developing countries had been affected by adjustment policies that had slowed economic growth and reduced social programs. A major study by UNICEF entitled The Invisible Adjustment had pointed out that at the household level, it was women who had born the brunt of the task of coping with reductions in social services and the increase in the cost of living that ensued. The notion that women and children were being hurt by structural adjustment policies was used to embarrass developed countries and international financial institutions, appealing to a notion that women and children were particularly vulnerable.

The Commission had decided, also for 1990, to consider the global economic crisis as its development priority theme. The Division decided to organize an expert group meeting in 1988 on the subject.

The Division prepared for the meeting by undertaking its own review of the literature. The staff member assigned was Marion Barthelemy, a young French economist who had joined the Secretariat by way of the national competitive examination. She quickly noticed that the short-term impact on women, noted in The Invisible Adjustment was due to the immediate stabilization programs, where a shock treatment was given to ensure currency stability including elimination of food subsidies. This meant that women, as the managers of household consumption, would have to find means of coping within reduced real income. The longer term effects of structural adjustment programs, she found, was less clear. One of the presumed effects of structural adjustment was a reduction in government expenditures and it was assumed that this might impact differentially on women. Using newly-available statistics from the United Nations Women’s Indicators and Statistics Database, as well as statistics collected by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Ms. Barthelemy was able to show that, in terms of education, there was no immediate effect of structural adjustment on educational expenditure but that trends of improvement in girls’ relative access to education stopped.

DAW also began to question whether the focus on women as victims of structural adjustment was the most appropriate, either normatively or in terms of facts. The Division had begun to see women in the economy as an asset rather than a liability. It raised these issues in its paper to the expert group meeting. The expert group meeting concluded that while structural adjustment had impacted on women, attention to gender factors could help mitigate the overall negative effects. It began to see that the most important adjustment strategies should involve investment in women, particularly in terms of the growth areas of the economy.

The conclusions of the expert group meeting were incorporated in a major economic study prepared by the Division, The World Survey on the Role of Women in Development which was issued in 1989. That document stated:

This theme was adopted in the recommendations arising from the 1990 review and appraisal of the Nairobi Strategies, which emphasized the need for positive actions:

• An economic environment of growth with equitable distribution, both at the national level and in the international economic system, is essential, as is the recognition of women's full participation. The feminization of poverty reflects the underlying structural problems faced by women in the midst of economic change. Prevailing economic policies at the national and international levels have frequently failed to take into account potential negative effects on women or women's potential contribution and have accordingly not succeeded.
• In order to help revitalize economic growth, international economic and social cooperation, together with sound economic policies, should be pursued. Structural adjustment and other economic reform measures should be designed and implemented so as to promote the full participation of women in the development process, while avoiding the negative economic and social effects. They should be accompanied by policies giving women equal access to credit, productive inputs, markets and decision-making and this should be incorporated fully into national economic policy and planning.

Once agreed, this approach part of the agreed language. As Beijing approached, other organizations began to take up the issue of women in credit, something that had been raised in the 1988 expert group meeting. With new UN statistics available, the Division began to explore what had been some of the long-term consequences for women of the global economic transformation.

Two young economists on the Division staff, Semia Guermas de Tapia from Nicaragua and Marina Ploutakhina from the Russian Federation, analyzed changes in women’s participation in the labor force over a 20 period. They noticed that women’s participation relative to men was rising, especially in growth sectors. This foreshadowed a major gender shift in employment and entrepreneurship that was also being noticed by the International Labour Organization. Their findings were incorporated in the 1994 World Survey on the Role of Women in Development. The focus was on the specific government policies that could take women’s potential into account. Its sections on the global economy, women and employment and women in economic decision-making provided a broad panorama that showed both the negative and positive aspects of structural adjustment.

During 1994, the Division organized an expert group meeting on women in economic decision-making that explored the implications of small-scale credit on women as entrepreneurs.

Much of the language of Sections IVA and IVF of the Platform for Action, dealing with women in the economy and women and poverty benefited from the Division’s analysis.

There are many other examples of how work done by the Division had an impact on the Platform for Action. DAW was playing a role that international secretariats should play in the development of global norms. It tried to identify those trends that were backed by facts but were acceptable to governments. It tried to write up this information in a politically-neutral way and mobilize support for the underlying ideas. To do so, staff members had to maintain contacts with a highly varied group of people: academic professionals, officials of other UN agencies, members of non-governmental organizations, delegates of meetings. They had to have a sense of the direction that ideas were taking. They were not innovators, but they were gatekeepers of ideas.

A good gatekeeper is someone who can recognise what is important and to do that she must also be committed to the issue. The Division staff, women and men alike, but predominately female, worked out of a strong commitment to advancement of women. For them, the issues were not abstractions. Most had suffered discrimination at some point in their lives. Many had themselves faced the double burden of work and family responsibility. With their variety of national and professional backgrounds they were, in some ways, a cross-section of the world’s women.

This meant that, in the internal meetings and brainstorming sessions before Secretariat drafts were prepared, heated discussions took place. Many of these mirrored the kinds of debates that would have taken place at the intergovernmental level. By finding common ground within the Secretariat, documents could be produced that made it easier for governments to find common ground.

The Division for the Advancement of Women with its colleagues in the Secretariat was a real – if not always visible – part of the process of elaborating the Platform for Action. That this was not noticed means that the Secretariat was doing its job properly. And doing their job properly, and affecting the outcome of history, is the main reward of the women and men who were the human faces of the United Nations at Beijing.