Source: The Sydney Morning Herald
LET it not be said that those wags at the United Nations don't have a sense of humour. Given the task of finding an office for the organisation's new women's rights body, they found some space in the Daily News building, otherwise known as the home of Superman.

Instead of Clark Kent, the world has Michelle Bachelet, taking on the superhuman challenge of redressing gender inequality. Unlike the last son of Krypton, relatively little is known about Bachelet outside her native Chile and the corridors of international diplomacy. And more than 100 days after it was set up, there are still significant questions about UN Women: what exactly will it do, what are its powers, and how it will be financed?

The body takes over from four existing, underfunded and relatively powerless institutions devoted to women's rights, which the UN general council voted to replace after Kofi Annan, former UN secretary-general, pointed out ''study after study has taught us that there is no tool for development more effective than the empowerment of women''.

Bachelet, who was Chile's first female head of state, should command a start-up budget of $US500 million by 2013, double what was available previously but only about 1.6 per cent of total UN funding.

Three months in, there are already signs of foot-dragging by major donors, but UN watchers believe Bachelet may have a better chance than most of cajoling her way through UN diplomacy. The daughter of an army general who died after months of torture by Augusto Pinochet's forces, Bachelet was herself tortured before being exiled. She then trained as a doctor and returned to Chile.

An avowed atheist, her achievements in office include a controversial decree allowing the morning-after pill to be distributed to women older than 14 without parental consent, policies to abolish shanty towns, and childcare for the poor.

In person, she is the opposite of a dry UN bureaucrat. She rattles off a list of priorities, ranging from political and economic empowerment to the ending of sexual violence. But first she apologises, in her fast-paced, heavily accented English, for the UN's parsimony with teabags.

''In my country, offering tea is a sign of hospitality,'' she begins. ''In the UN, nothing. You cannot use the money from the UN for that. My God! It's not like I'm going to be offering whisky, you know. Just a cup of tea. Water. Something.''

Once the team is all together and not in temporary accommodation, she promises to ''bring my china cups'' and her own tea.

Charming and voluble, she is credited with getting her own way while making relatively few enemies in her home country. She will need all her skills of persuasion to persuade member states to help her department, as some place a low priority on women's rights.

Her arguments are backed by a wealth of data. In the same breath, she mentions a World Economic Forum study that found greater productivity in countries where women achieved senior positions, and a $US3 million program in Liberia to improve conditions of women market traders. ''Just 19 per cent of parliamentarians are women and we are more than half of humanity,'' she says. ''There are 19 female head of states in 192 member states. And just 15 of Fortune 500 chief executives are women. You see we have a problem.''

Sixteen years after a Beijing assembly set a target of 30 per cent women in national parliaments, only 28 countries meet this target. Most - 23 - did so after introducing quotas, a controversial practice that Bachelet supports. ''I am in favour of affirmative action when there is exclusion.''

Economic empowerment is high on her agenda and she lays out the financial benefit of ending violence against women, which she says costs the US $5.8 billion and Australia $13.6 billion a year ''in terms of medical costs, loss of productivity and childcare''.

Perhaps the easiest way to understand the five priorities of UN Women - expanding women's leadership; enhancing women's economic empowerment; ending violence against women and girls; bringing women to the centre of the peace and security agenda; focusing national plans and budgets on gender equality - is to think of all the things not necessarily covered by far larger organisations, such as health (WHO), and children (UNICEF). However, the new body will also help co-ordinate gender policies at those organisations and, perhaps more importantly, improve accountability.

UN Women research last year suggested that women made up less than 8 per cent of negotiating teams in 24 peace processes over the past two decades, and Bachelet believes women's issues are missing from peace agreements as a result. A survey of 300 peace agreements in 45 conflicts since the end of the Cold War found only 18 mentioning sexual and gender violence, even though this is a widespread violation in modern conflicts.

It has been more than 30 years since the UN adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and some would argue that inequality has got worse. Yet Bachelet believes real change could come. ''Maybe one day UN Women won't be necessary because women won't be discriminated against and will be in power.''