How Financial Incentives Can Boost the Number of Women Peacekeepers (News Deeply)

From the op-ed:

U.N. Peacekeeping Operations are a great deal. For the United States, they cost about half as much as a unilateral mission to implement, and the United States pays less than one-third of that cost, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. And the international evidence suggests they work to keep the peace by considerably reducing the risk of civil wars reigniting.

But these operations are far from free of failure and scandal – from bringing cholera to Haiti to child and sexual abuse. There were “145 cases of sexual exploitation and abuse involving all members of the U.N. in 2016,” and surveys suggest these are conservative estimates.

One important factor behind these failures is the gross gender inequality in security operations. Of the 106,286 U.N. military and police peacekeepers active in July 2015, a mere 4 percent were women.

The Security Council recently called for a doubling of women in peacekeeping by 2020 – but on current trends, we’ll hit gender parity in U.N. peacekeeping forces sometime around the year 2352. That suggests we need more than grand statements to foster change.

Read full op-ed here.