Guidance note and template: Gender parity action plan for United Nations Country Teams

Achieving gender parity is essential to building a more representative, credible, and effective United Nations. Parity strengthens decision-making, institutional effectiveness, and the UN’s capacity to deliver across its development, humanitarian, and peace and security mandates.

While progress has been made, country-level representation remains uneven, with barriers affecting recruitment, retention, career progression, leadership, and workplace culture, particularly in mission, hardship, and non-family duty stations. This publication, produced by the Office of the Focal Point for Women in the UN System within UN Women’s UN System Coordination Division, helps UN Country Teams translate system-wide commitments into context-specific action. In particular, it supports the minimum requirement under UNCT-SWAP Gender Equality Scorecard Performance Indicator 4.3 that a system-wide plan be in place for the UNCT to achieve gender parity.

Complementing the UNCT-SWAP Gender Scorecard Framework and technical guidance, the publication provides a step-by-step process, template, suggested measures, and examples from country-level experience. It helps UNCTs use workforce data and organizational culture surveys to identify gaps and root causes, set targets, assign responsibilities and resources, and monitor progress.

The guidance addresses five interconnected areas:

• targets and measurement
• leadership and accountability
• recruitment, retention, and talent management
• enabling environments and organizational culture
• mission, field, and hardship settings

By embedding parity within UNCT governance, workplans, business operations strategies, and UNCT-SWAP follow-up, it turns commitment into accountability, advances the UN System-wide Gender Equality Acceleration Plan, and supports inclusive workplaces that strengthen UN credibility and results.