by TERESA XIE
Delegates raise their placards at LABMUNC, hoping the Dais will call on them. LABMUNC is the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools’ annual one day MUN conference PHOTO/Teresa Xie
When Ilana Dutton first joined the Model United Nations club in her high school as a sophomore, juniors on the team warned her about the additional challenges she would face as a girl. They told her that she’d be called “bitchy” or “bossy” if she was successful.
“Despite that, I still wanted to do MUN because I’ve always been interested in international relations and global affairs,” says Dutton. “I also liked public speaking and wanted to become better at it.”
As many as 200,000 high schoolers in the U.S. participate in Model United Nations each year, according to reports from the United Nations Association of the United States of America. The association didn’t respond to requests for information about the composition of participants, but it appears, anecdotally, to be evenly balanced male-female.
High school teams travel to conferences hosted by high schools or universities where their members represent delegates on various committees of the United Nations, such as those working on decolonization and disarmament, as well as the Security Council.
Model United Nations is a high school extracurricular activity that pushes students to step out of their comfort zone, gaining skills in speaking, collaboration and foreign policy as teens debate, write and strategize ways to solve global issues. Awards are given for leadership, diplomacy and public speaking.
But three female participants at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, one of the leading teams in the country, say the experience is tarnished by the sexism they face at the conferences. Faculty sponsors declined to be interviewed for this article.
Many teens who attend Model U.N. conferences are there mainly for the experience and are not necessarily focused on winning an award.
Avoiding Labels
But Dutton’s team is one of the top five teams in the nation according, to Best Delegate, the leading Model U.N. site in the United States. Dutton, a 2016 graduate of the school, who spoke by phone recently, says that as a competitive female delegate she felt extremely conscious about the way she acted at Model U.N. conferences, trying to avoid being labeled as “bossy” or “bitchy” by her peers on the committee.
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