Just before the year ended, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced another set of officials to join his leadership team; nearly all of them women. The list of eight new appointees — which was not made available to the media but was seen by Devex earlier this week — include directors for some of the agency’s biggest and newest programs.

Elizabeth Iro was already announced at the WHO Western Pacific regional meeting in October as WHO’s chief nursing officer. The others on the list are Shenaaz El-Halabi from Botswana, and Min Whee Kang from South Korea, who will both be taking the role of director in the Office of the Director-General; Dr. Tereza Kasaeva from Russia, as the new director of the WHO’s Global Tuberculosis Program; and Diah Saminarsih from Indonesia, as advisor on gender and youth in the Office of the Director-General.

Despite setting a target of achieving 50% gender equity in 1997, WHO has not lived up to that goal. Two decades later, only 28% of the directors are women,” he said in the email. “As you’ve seen, we’ve started to change that, first when I appointed nine extraordinary women in October to the senior management team. For the first time in WHO history, women outnumber men in the senior leadership.” -Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

But he acknowledged there is still much work ahead, and he told staff that his office is “already working with experts on refining the recruitment process to tackle some unconscious biases that have created gender and geographic inequalities — and to ensure we can more quickly and efficiently bring in diverse talent where we have gaps.”

Read the full article by Jenny Lei Ravelo about women in senior leadership from Devex International Development