Good afternoon. Thank you for making yourselves available and joining us this afternoon.
Professor Goetz, my question is going to be for you based on some reading I did, an article that was made available to us. It gets to the larger issue of accountability and the issue of political will. It's particularly around a quote taken from the article:
Despite the creation in 2011 of UN Women, an agency dedicated to gender equality and women’s empowerment, neither objective appears to be a priority for the most powerful parts of the UN secretariat: the Department of Political Affairs (DPA) and the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO).... are male-dominated and resistant to the idea that women’s empowerment is central to their missions.
It also talks about their paying lip service to getting to the 15% of their funds being used to promote gender equality and women's empowerment.
How do we go about moving this forward? We've heard from so many of the witnesses over the last month that this really is a sticking point and that it takes the creation of political will to move it forward. I heard from the previous comment that the answer to this might be a woman secretary-general, but maybe that's oversimplified and wouldn't change it enough and wouldn't move it forward enough. How can we start advancing this when the push-back is coming at the highest level in some of these organizations?