“We can’t use any of your data!” The first hours of my internship at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland was spent listening to a heated conversation between my supervisor and one of our implementing partners. There was apparently a misunderstanding between reporting based on project year and reporting based on calendar year. Long story short, the data we received were completely incompatible with all our other data sets. Frustration was thick in the air.
At this point, I was joined by 2 other female colleagues–both more upset than my supervisor. Since then, I’ve discovered that by far the majority of the people I interact with (>80%) are female, though curiously the upper echelons of administration seems to be male-dominated. For example, in the sub-division I work with, the top 3 executive spots are all male, while almost the entire rest of the group (60+ people) are female. (I should say, however, that the most senior position of the WHO–the Director General–is held by Dr. Margaret Chan, a woman.) The gender ratio is even more female-biased in the interns. There are currently about 250 interns at the WHO, and less than 10% are male. Apparently the prevailing wisdom is that women are more compassionate and are in general more willing to take a career of service that doesn’t pay terribly well. I’m not sure if that fully explains the discrepancy, but I don’t think there’s discrimination against man from entering into public health.
The heated phone call continues for another hour as people walk by our office. Observing my new colleagues, I’ve discovered the WHO staff to be immensely diverse. The group I work with purportedly have people from 49 different countries. What’s interesting is that there doesn’t seem to be much racial tension. I don’t feel so “Asian” in the WHO, I just feel like I’m a person from North America. Curiously there is the “Americans and Japanese people work too hard” stereotype, but that’s national and not based on race, as far as I can tell. I think, at least in the WHO, race is just not as big of a deal of as it is in the United States; this is perhaps because you interact with quite a range of nationalities within each race, and it is much more practical to have national, rather than racial, stereotypes.
The interns, however, are not so diverse. Almost everyone I have met thus far have been from America, Canada, or Europe, and I think there is a direct coorelation between the wealth of a country and how many interns are represented. The WHO does not pay its interns, which means the only people who can finance a living in Geneva, Switzerland for the summer (the 4th most expensive city in the world) are people who are either wealthy or have access to institutional resources. I don’t think this is fair; I share an office with a man from South Africa and a woman from India, and to date I have not met a single intern from either India or the entire continent of Africa.
The phone call ends with everyone getting frustrated with the lack of progress and resolution. After the incident, my supervisor apologized to me for such an introduction to public health. But I wasn’t disappointed by the exercise–I had expected a large, international organization like the WHO to have many frustrating moments. After all, when you’re working with the Ministry of Health of some 190 countries and numerous NGOs, it would be a miracle if nothing ever went wrong.
Instead of being disappointed, I was pleasantly surprised; I was not expecting to see that despite these frustrations, almost everyone I met still cared deeply about bettering the world. For example, my group has struggled with how to transition some of our projects to other partners (like UNICEF or PEPFAR) because we only fund projects in the short-term. Transitioning has proved to be a huge headache, as finding a partner, making sure they’re responsible, and ensuring we have all the logistics, reporting, and coordination done in a timely manner is a massive and complicated undertaking.
A co-worker suggested during a meeting: “Why don’t we just let other organizations figure out all the transitioning stuff before we give them money for any of their project proposals?” The immediate reaction from the group was one of disapproval. People said that’s irresponsible; the WHO is here to improve the health of people and while we can get away with doing less work, morally that’s not the right thing to do. We should take responsibility for transitioning, not because we contractually have to, but because we ought to. I found this surprising–and inspiring. Beneath the intimidating and bureaucratic front of the WHO, there seems to be a real sense of fairness, decency, and passion for doing good in the world.
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