Gender Equality as an Idea and Practice - A Case Study of an Office at the United Nations Headquarters

Achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls, is one of the United Nations (UN) core objectives. However, the UN has been struggling with achieving gender balance in its own organisation, despite numerous attempts. Men have been in numerical dominance at the UN since inception, especially on senior positions. This case study takes place just months after the System-wide strategy for gender parity was launched by Secretary-General Guterres. It captures the initial reactions through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with five women working in one UN body at the UN Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Through these stories and experiences, this thesis aims to analyse the UN as a gendered organisation, focusing on organisational structure and culture. I argue that gendered processes of the organisational structure and culture preserve the male-dominance by having including effects on men and excluding effects on women. In this thesis I use gendered processes (Acker 1992), combined with post-structural policy analysis (Bacchi 2009) and complex systems theory (Ramalingam 2013), as analytical tools to show how equality is constructed and understood as an idea and in practice