Perhaps, over a drink, I can tell you the reality of life.
I see different things happening. My organization did a study for UNDP last year on the appointment of peace and development advisers. These are P5s, moderately senior people, who are joint UNDP and DPA appointees to conflict areas, where they look at peace building. Over the last 10 years, they haven't been able to increase the percentage of women beyond 23%.
We went down to the raw data of the applicants, to the type of job advertising that was done and where it was presented. What we saw was that the filtering happens between the long lists and the short lists. The ideal of a notion of a PDA was described as somebody who is a jack-of-all-trades, grey-haired, with gravitas. Many of us may have grey hair, but we don't show it, necessarily, in this field. Jack-of-all-trades, gravitas, or the whisky boys' club, as some of the descriptions were given from inside the system, don't really denote women. These are masculine traits.
Our findings were that, on average, there are 40 PDAs in any given year. Twenty of the contracts are being renewed or no new contracts are being issued in any year. That means if you want to have parity, you have to find 10 women across the world to fill those jobs—10 women. That's not hard to do, right? It's just a matter of making that affirmative action call.
The response we got from our colleagues was interesting. Some were saying, “Yes, absolutely”, and others were saying, “Well, you know, we should do this by 2020”. Well, 2020 is an eternity away, frankly. It's just dragging feet, so it is about political will at the very top.
The other point I'd like to make is that a lot of the expertise that exists in this realm of peace and security, with the gender lines and so forth, resides in civil society. We need a pipeline from civil society into the UN system. Those of us who have been doing this work for 20 years in civil society have 20 years of experience. If the job advertising says you need 20 years of UN experience, however, or that you have to be a government employee to get in, you're not going to get the best talent across the world. That's a shame and a waste of resources.