Uncovering HERstory at the United Nations
- Ursula Wynhoven and Kadiatou Sall-Beye
- May 24, 2018
- 2 min read
The United Nations has its own Hidden Figures story around its creation. Hidden Figures is the story of black female mathematicians who worked at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration but were kept in the background. At the conference at which the UN was founded in 1945, women constituted only 3% of the delegates but they played a very key part in its creation, which is not widely known. Only four women signed the UN Charter. At the time, in twenty of the fifty countries that participated, women did not yet have the right to vote.
UN Headquarters in New York on 22 May 2018. Photo credit: Ursula Wynhoven
An event at UN Headquarters in New York on Women and the Origins of the UN - A Southern Legacy, held on 22 May 2018, highlighted some of these stories and the contributions of women, especially from the Global South.
The Permanent Missions of Brazil, Colombia, Ghana, India, Pakistan and South Africa teamed up with Stockholm University and SOAS University of London to uncover these stories from the UN archives and bring them to a wider audience. Among their many achievements, these women ensured that the Preamble and Article 8 of the UN Charter did not only refer to men, but to both men and women. Brazilian delegate Dr. Bertha Lutz and women delegates from Australia and Uruguay played a particularly instrumental role in ensuring the rights of women are included in the UN Charter.
Ms. Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti, the Chef de Cabinet of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres joined the session. She reiterated the Secretary-General’s commitment to gender equality, as demonstrated by his recent announcement that full gender parity had been achieved in the top leadership of the UN, in his Senior Management Group, and among Resident Coordinators of the UN at the country level.
Ursula Wynhoven is the ITU Representative to the United Nations
Kadiatou Sall-Beye is the Project Officer at International Telecommunication Union (ITU)
The article gives valuable attention to women’s history, representation, and the importance of recognizing contributions that were often left out of traditional records. Events like this also show how professional spaces can connect history, identity, and personal expression, including the way people present themselves through clothing and footwear. Comfortable trainers can be a practical part of that everyday style for conferences, travel, or long events. For anyone who prefers modern streetwear footwear, sneakers at urban kinetic wear for style nike tn trainers can be another option to explore when comparing Nike styles and everyday trainer choices.
This piece highlights the significant yet overlooked contributions of women during the UN's founding. It's vital to acknowledge their impact in shaping history, much like the story of Hidden Figures. Check out xenofeels for more insights.
Such a meaningful initiative. Side note for the EQUALS team: between the four coalitions (Access, Skills, Leadership, Research), partner directory (50+ organizations across UN, government, private sector, academia, NGOs), HerStory video series, EQUALS in Tech Awards, the Research Group portal, and decade+ of policy publications, you've built one of the richest gender-and-tech coalition archives anywhere — but new partners and researchers face a wall of nav. A "Find Your Entry Point with EQUALS" sortable landing page (filter by role — researcher / educator / policymaker / corporate partner + by coalition focus + by region → matched resource + partner directory + relevant publication) would dramatically improve coalition activation. I help small UN-affiliated nonprofits ship that with a copy web…
"HerStory at the UN" is such an important counter-archive — the contributions of women to ICT4D at the UN level genuinely don't get the visual recognition they deserve. I help with content for a small gender-and-tech research collective and we've started using an Nano Banana AI to restore archival photographs of early women leaders (badly-scanned 1970s-80s conference shots, low-resolution UN press images) into clean usable assets for our own historical features. Stock photography for "women in tech" is uniformly contemporary — the historical archive is where the gap actually is. Looking forward to the full series rollout.
this article sheds light on a crucial but often overlooked part of history. the focus on women from the global south and their specific contributions, like the work of bertha lutz, is particularly valuable. it's important to recognize these foundational efforts, especially when considering the un's ongoing work on gender equality. the use of archival research to uncover these stories makes the narrative more concrete and credible. AI Image Editor