Thank you. It's a great question.
I think that may have been from an article that we wrote together, certainly we've made this point in writing together.
It is a huge obstacle within the UN that the departments responsible for political work and the more military work lack, in my view, serious commitment at the very top. It's complicated and it's a long story, and what can countries do?
I want to throw that back at you because Canada is in a great position within the UN. It's an important country. Its views matter. It's got a lot of money. It's a huge international promoter of human rights, or should be. In bilateral discussions or with the leaders of DPA and DPKO, there is room for saying that this has to change, that we need to see more concerted effort.
To give a small example, DFAIT funded UN Women and DPA a couple of years ago to get more women on its mediation rosters, which is important, but still, with every single mediation appointment, with the exception of Mary Robinson, we keep seeing a man being appointed and we don't know what the short list looked like. We don't know if there was adequate attention to alternatives within that short list.
To add to that, you may have also seen recently a series of articles in the Centre on International Cooperation's Peace Operations Review, for example, on the number of women recently appointed to under secretary-general and assistant secretary-general posts at the UN. Something like 93% of appointments of USGs in 2015 were male.
There's a filtering process here and it's managed by these two major entities. They are hugely influential. They're supposed to have a fifty-fifty short list. We don't know if they do because that information isn't made publicly available.
I guess I'm dodging the question and throwing it back at you. What can bilaterals do to push these agencies? You're the boss at the UN; it's an intergovernmental organization. This is supposed to be your secretariat.