Who works at the UN?
In my previous video on skills and experience for getting a job in the UN, I mentioned that I would do a video explaining the profiles of staff currently employed by the UN. The United Nations employs 116,388 people in staff positions. All the statistics used in this post come from the latest personnel report, which was published using 2020 data.
Gender
Of the approximately 116,000 people who work at the UN, 63,868 or 55% are men and 52,520 or 45% are women (UN CEB). Now this is one of those examples of where the devil is in the details. Because while these overall numbers look pretty balanced, not bad. There is a different story if you dive into the gender split at different levels of seniority. If we take just professional positions, for example, we actually see that more young women are entering into the organization but by the time they reach very senior positions, men are in the vast majority. Let me show what I mean.
UN professional positions are on a scale - P1 is the most entry level, and P5 is highest level before Director, and there are two levels of Directors.
At P1, a whopping 73% of employees are women. And then it begins to decrease from there. At P2 it’s 59%, at P3 it’s 48%, at P4 it’s 45%, at P5 it’s 40%. Then when we get into director-level, D1 is 40% women and D2 is only 35% women. So you can see that while it may be balanced at some levels, ultimately there are more men in the higher levels of the organization and at an absolute level as well.
Nationality
The UN has a very diverse workforce with no single nationality taking up more than 4.7% of the total workforce (UN CEB).
The top 10 countries hired in the UN are:
United States - 4.7%
France - 3.7%
Kenya - 3.2%
Italy - 3.1%
Democratic Republic of the Congo - 2.6%
Ethiopia - 2.4%
Sudan - 2.3%
The United Kingdom - 2.2%
India - 2.1%
Philippines - 1.8%
We can also look at this at a Regional level and I think it provides helpful insight as well.
Africa 35.5%
Asia 26%
Europe 23%
Americas 14%
Oceania 1.5%
Age
The largest percentage of staff are between 40-45 years of age and the average age of hiring into the UN is 43 years old, but let’s look at the entire distribution for a clearer understanding.
Under 25 - 0.11%
25-30 - 2.4%
30-35 - 8.93%
35-40 - 15.39%
40-45 - 18.91%
45-50 - 18.32%
50-55 - 15.77%
55-60 - 12.85%
60-65 - 7.07%
65+ - 0.25%
Entity
The largest employing entities in the UN system, in order, are the secretariat, UNICEF, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, the World Health Organization, the United Nations Development Program, the International Migration Organization, and the World Food Programme (UN CEB).
A Typical Profile…?
So there you have it folks, that is gender, nationality, age, and organization of employment.
Taking all that together.. I am going to paint a picture of a typical UN employee based on the statistics. This employee would be an American man aged 43, working in the General Service of the UN Secretariat for less than 5 years total likely in New York.
That’s the most statistically probable UN staff member. However, as you saw, it’s a very diverse organization so there’s no real way to draw an archetype and if you ever have the opportunity to work in the system, you will meet people from all over the world, of different ages, working in all types of roles and capacities.
Keep Learning
Here are a few great resources for further reading and learning: