Eighty years, nine men: Why the next UN Secretary General should be a woman

Since 1946, nine people have led the United Nations as Secretary General. All nine have been men. As the Security Council works through its straw polls to choose the tenth, with António Guterres’s term ending on December 31, 2026, the organisation faces a choice that is about more than one appointment. It is about whether the UN’s highest office will finally reflect the equality the organisation has spent eight decades asking its member states to practise.

The case does not rest on symbolism. It rests on evidence, on history, and on an unusual alignment of circumstances that makes this year the moment to act.

The 2026 edition of the Women in Multilateralism report, which compiles every known official candidacy for Secretary General since 1945, counts 48 men and only eight women, and no woman elected. For the first six decades of the UN’s existence, not a single woman was even formally considered for the post. The first, Latvia’s President Vaira Vike-Freiberga, entered the race only in 2006.

The wider multilateral system tells a story of slow and uneven progress. Across the 54 international organisations tracked in the report, 540 leaders have been appointed since 1945, yet only 70 were women. In the last five decades of the twentieth century, women averaged 3.7% of heads and never rose above 10%.

The recent picture is more encouraging, and that is precisely the point. Women now lead 46% of the 62 organisations examined in the 2026 report. Yet their presence thins as power concentrates: women hold on average 29% of seats on governing bodies and 23% of Permanent Representative posts in New York, and 72 countries have never sent a woman to that role. Within the UN Secretariat, senior leadership is now split equally between women and men, the product of deliberate policy. Progress has followed decisions. The one office no woman has held is the one that sets the tone for all the others.

The pattern holds well beyond New York. Our 2025 Women in Diplomacy Index at the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy, which tracks ambassadorial appointments worldwide, finds that women hold 22.5% of ambassador and permanent representative posts. This is the pool from which secretaries general are usually drawn, and it is still overwhelmingly male. Yet it is also changing, including in the Gulf: in the UAE, women’s share of ambassadorships rose from 7% in 2018 to 13% in 2025. The UAE’s Shaikha Al Nuwais now serves as the first woman secretary-general of UN Tourism since early 2026, and Razan Mubarak has served as the President of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) since 2021. When governments decide to act, the numbers move.

The 2016 race for SG should have been the breakthrough. It was the most open selection in the UN’s history, with public dialogues for every candidate and an explicit invitation to nominate women. Seven women were formally nominated, more than double the number who had ever before reached the ballot. They included Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand and head of UNDP; Irina Bokova, former Director-General of UNESCO; Susana Malcorra, former Argentinian foreign minister; Christiana Figueres, a leading diplomat from Costa Rica; and Kristalina Georgieva, the current head of the International Monetary Fund.

Qualifications were never the problem. In the early straw polls, men consistently received more encouragement than women, and women crowded the bottom five places. Process compounded the imbalance: Bulgaria withdrew its backing from Bokova mid-race to nominate Georgieva as a late entrant, dividing support. The lesson was not that women lacked merit, but that an open invitation is not the same as an equal process. As Malcorra has since argued, the real question is whether merit has been “defined and recognised fairly.”

Several things are different today. First, the mandate is clearer. General Assembly resolution 79/327 of September 2025 strengthened the call for states to nominate a woman candidate to the post, “noting with regret” that the post has never been held by a woman. The language has moved from polite invitation to institutional and collective regret.

Second, the field itself has changed. In 2016, women were the exception among the front-runners. This time, a woman has topped every one of the Security Council’s straw polls held since July, with UNCTAD’s Rebeca Grynspan garnering the highest number of “Encourage” votes. For the first time, the question is not whether a woman can be competitive, but whether the Council is prepared to complete what the polls have repeatedly signalled.

Third, geography and gender point in the same direction. Under the informal rotation, Latin America and the Caribbean is widely seen as next in line, a view regional states have pressed publicly this month. It is a region with a deep bench of women who have served as heads of state, foreign ministers and senior international civil servants. Rotation and parity need not compete.

Fourth, the institution needs it. The UN enters its ninth decade facing a liquidity crisis, contested authority and wars that have tested its very own Charter. This is not an argument that women lead differently or better. That evidence is contested and beside the point. It is an argument about legitimacy. An organisation that has spent a quarter of a century since UNSC resolution 1325 in 2000 (which established the Women, Peace and Security Agenda), urging governments to bring women into peace and security decisions cannot keep exempting its own summit from that standard. The UN must practice what it has spent decades preaching.

The choice belongs to the Security Council and, ultimately, the General Assembly, and it should go to the best candidate. Choosing the “best” has too long been measured against a pool that excluded half of humanity by habit rather than by design. Appointing a woman would not lower the bar. It would remove a barrier that has kept the bar artificially narrow.

That responsibility now rests with the fifteen members of the Council, and above all with the permanent five who hold a veto. The straw polls have shown, repeatedly, that a woman can command the nine votes required yet none of the candidates for SG has garnered the support of all 5 permanent Council members thus far. States can still nominate newcomers. The race can still welcome more women.

Eighty years is long enough. The tenth Secretary General should be the first woman to hold the office. What remains is the political will to make it a reality.