IGC co-founder Michael Møller will complete his mandate as Director-General of UN Geneva at the end of June, thus becoming an IGC Alumnus.
“It has changed the way that we work”, UN Geneva Director-General Michael Møller said while speaking of the International Gender Champions (IGC) at his last press conference on 25 June 2019.
Michael Møller launched the Gender Champions in 2015 in collaboration with the then Permanent Representative of the USA to the UN in Geneva, Ambassador Pamela Hamamoto, and Women@TheTable’s Executive Director Caitlin Kraft-Buchman. This leadership network intended to bring together female and male leaders and foster concrete actions from the highest level to break down gender barriers.
“It first started as the Geneva Gender Champions and became a more successful initiative than I thought it would be when we first started out”, Michael Møller said. The network soon expanded to four other cities – New York, Vienna, Nairobi, and The Hague – and is also expected to open hubs in other locations.
Thanks to the IGC Panel Parity Pledge, Michael Møller stated, “there are practically no meetings held in this building [the Palais des Nations] that don’t have both genders represented”,he added, “when it does happen, action gets taken very quickly”.
As part of his commitments as an International Gender Champion, Michael Møller also led a number of transformative measures at the United Nations Office at Geneva.
Among others, he launched the organization’s first-ever Policy for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women in 2016 and ran a staff survey on gender perceptions in 2017.
Because the latter had revealed that one third of staff had witnessed or experienced sexist comments, the Director-General decided to launch a groundbreaking campaign against sexism in 2018.
Under Michael Møller’s mandate, UNOG also practically reached gender parity.
Thank you, Mr. Møller, for your unique leadership and genuine dedication to gender equality!