UN Women

UN Women is the United Nations entity responsible for gender equality and women’s empowerment worldwide, created in 2010 by merging four older UN bodies, and it is also the agency whose institutional caution on October 7, 2023 became one of the clearest examples of how a UN body devoted to protecting women handled the mass rape of Israeli women when the perpetrators were Palestinian. It does real, documented work on maternal health, economic empowerment and gender-based violence in dozens of countries. It also serves as the secretariat for a commission that seated Iran, months after Iranian security forces were killing women in the streets, and it needed until December 2023 to use the word “unequivocally” about an attack that happened on October 7.

What it is

The UN General Assembly created UN Women in July 2010 as “the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women,” consolidating four smaller and overlapping bodies: the Division for the Advancement of Women, the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women, the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues, and the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). It is led by an Executive Director holding the rank of UN Under-Secretary-General, currently Sima Bahous of Jordan, and overseen by an Executive Board of member states. UN Women also provides the secretariat and substantive support for the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), the UN’s main intergovernmental body on women’s rights, which meets annually in New York. Unlike the UN’s core budget, UN Women runs almost entirely on voluntary contributions from member states, foundations and the private sector, meaning its funding, and to some degree its programming priorities, are shaped by which governments choose to pay.

What it does

UN Women funds and runs programs across roughly 90 countries: maternal health and reproductive rights initiatives, microfinance and land-title programs for rural women, legal aid for survivors of domestic violence, and support for women’s political participation, including election-monitoring and quota programs that have helped raise female representation in a number of national parliaments. It also convenes the annual CSW sessions where member states negotiate agreed conclusions on issues from unpaid care work to digital-era violence against women. This work is real and, in aggregate, has moved measurable indicators like girls’ school enrollment and women’s labor-force participation in partner countries. It is also the least controversial part of the organization’s record, which is why it rarely generates headlines.

The Iran seat: 2021 to 2022

In April 2021, member states elected Iran to a four-year term on the CSW, the body UN Women services. UN Watch first exposed the election and spent eighteen months campaigning against it: press conferences with Iranian dissidents, a draft resolution for Iran’s removal, and a petition that gathered more than 36,000 signatures from 84 countries. After Iranian security forces killed Mahsa Amini in September 2022 for an alleged headscarf violation and then killed protesters in the crackdown that followed, the US brought a resolution to the UN Economic and Social Council. On 14 December 2022, member states voted 29 to 8, with 16 abstentions, to remove Iran from the CSW, the first time any country had ever been expelled from a UN commission mid-term. The US ambassador at the time called Iran’s membership “an ugly stain on the Commission’s credibility.” UN Women itself did not initiate the removal; it took an outside watchdog and eighteen months of pressure to undo an election the UN’s own membership had made in the first place.

The October 7 record

On 7 October 2023, Hamas fighters raped, mutilated and murdered Israeli women in a coordinated, premeditated assault, later documented by a UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict and independent investigators. UN Women’s own published timeline of its statements shows the sequence: its first statement came six days later, on 13 October 2023, addressing the general impact on women and girls without naming sexual violence. Sexual violence was first mentioned on 25 October, in a Security Council briefing referencing “all reports.” A second briefing on 22 November expressed alarm at “gender-based and sexual violence in the attacks on Israel.” It was not until 1 December 2023, nearly two months after the attack, that UN Women issued a statement unequivocally condemning the attacks and citing “numerous accounts of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence.” A further statement marking 100 days of war, on 19 January 2024, referenced “shocking accounts of unconscionable sexual violence.” The gap between the atrocity and an unequivocal condemnation from the one UN agency whose founding purpose is protecting women from exactly this kind of violence drew sustained criticism, including from UN Watch, over an institutional hesitation that did not extend to the agency’s much faster statements on Palestinian casualties in Gaza during the same period.

What the double standard proves

An agency built to be the world’s foremost voice against violence targeting women faced a textbook case, mass rape used as a weapon in an attack against a UN member state, and its institutional machinery moved slower on naming it than it did on seating the regime that was, at the same moment, killing women for showing their hair. Neither failure means UN Women’s field programs on maternal health or economic empowerment are fictions; they are not. But the two facts sit side by side: real programmatic work in dozens of countries, and a governance and messaging record that, when Israeli women were the victims, moved with a caution it did not show anywhere else.