Description
Drawing on Feminist Institutionalism, critical management studies, sociological approaches and in-depth interviews with 28 staff from a range of UN organisations, this paper examines whether the complex and at times contradictory change processes taking place within the UN system during the first 18 months of the COVID pandemic challenged or sustained existing gendered and racial hierarchical stratifications within the UN system. Specifically, the paper explores how women and men address the liminalities of silence, absence and presence within international institutional spaces during a global pandemic and examines the tactics they use to help progress their career while in lockdown and working from home. In doing so, the paper advances understandings of how Feminist Institutionalism helps explain how feminist advocates use strategic-level system-wide change processes to redistribute power and advance gender and race equality at the micro-level within international organisations.
