International organizations led by the UN, the Council of Europe (CoE) and the EU are at the forefront of
promoting gender equality among their member states. Such targets are set in their respective binding
and non-binding acquis (long-term programs, recommendations and resolutions, directives and
treaties), which push member states to implement gender-positive measures with the aim of achieving
at least 40% representation of women, generally considered as the threshold for gender equality.
However, their own internal gender equality rules and procedures are often not transparent and lack
external monitoring and sanctioning mechanisms. All three organizations have set ambitious internal
targets, with both the UN and the COE aiming to achieve gender equality at all staff levels by 2028 and
2023 (UN, 2017; COE, 2018). The EU has set the goal of achieving gender balance in all decision-making
positions by 2025. Both the UN and the EU use quotas to achieve these goals, especially in higher
decision-making positions (European Commission, 2020). However, despite significant progress, these
organizations have yet to achieve gender equality, and decision-making in organizations is still
dominated by men, who occupy around 70% of high level leadership positions. Such a situation points to
existing glass ceilings (Haack, 2014) and direct and indirect forms of discrimination (Powell & Graves,
2018; Kampen & Grote, 2019). The aim of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of internal gender
equality methods and to identify gaps and areas for improvement based on a comparative analysis of
existing internal rules and practices in the UN, CoE and EU. In the last decade, several partial studies
have already been done in this area (EK 2014; UN Women; Maier & Wroblewski, 2018; Vargas 2019;
Kenny, 2019; Müller & Tömmel, 2022), but more comprehensive and comparative research is still
lacking. The presented research tries to at least partially fill this gap and thus contribute to the existing
literature on female leadership in international organizations. Based on the theory of organizational
effectiveness, symbolic and substantive representation, this study also explains the motives for
promoting gender equality within international organizations that strive to increase their reputation,
credibility and legitimacy.
