Founded though it may be on principles of protecting human dignity and promoting equality, the UN has never appointed a woman to its top job. While state delegates gather for the UN General Assembly in New York each year to talk about closing gender gaps and empowering women, when it comes to the processes to select its secretary-general, they’ve so far perpetuated the exclusion the UN claims to stand against.

This reflects a global problem. Women are consistently overlooked for leading roles: worldwide, barely 27 per cent of parliamentarians are women, and just 19 countries have a woman head of state, while 22 have a female head of government.

The situation is a little better at the international level: according to monitoring by GQUAL, a civil society campaign that promotes gender equality in international bodies, women hold under 44 per cent of positions, although their share is much lower for international and regional courts. But some international bodies, particularly those where states nominate and vote on leading roles, have seen women’s participation advance at an agonisingly slow pace despite decades of advocacy.

During last year’s session of the General Assembly, current UN secretary-general António Guterres called the gender balance unacceptable. He’s right, but it takes action as well as words to break glass ceilings.

Civil society mobilises

Unwilling to accept another decade of excuses, civil society is mobilising through the 1 for 8 billion campaign. This builds on the success of its predecessor, the 1 for 7 billion campaign, which in 2016 forced crucial transparency reforms onto a selection process historically characterised by backroom deals. This paved the way for open hearings and greater public scrutiny of candidates.

Now civil society has the selection of a first female UN Secretary-General in its sights. Civil society groups are pushing for states to nominate feminist women candidates and insist on a fully transparent process, including public updates, disclosed campaign funding and explicit commitments from candidates to uphold UN Charter principles and refrain from political horse-trading.

The campaign has been tracking state positions on this issue and developed a ranking system it uses to put pressure on governments and demand consistency between words and deeds. It classifies state positions as very strongly supportive when they specify tangible actions to ensure a woman secretary-general, strongly supportive when they defend gender equality without setting out specific proposals, indirectly supportive when they acknowledge gender equality without explicitly advocating for a woman candidate and opposed when they only push for male candidates and refuse to acknowledge gender equality as a priority.

GQUAL, which has advocated for gender parity in international justice for over a decade, recently joined 1 for 8 billion’s steering committee alongside other organisations including CIVICUS. These campaigns embody a growing global consensus that it’s high time women are recognised as decision makers and leaders in international organisations.

An archaic selection process

The secretary-general selection process has barely changed over the years. It remains an archaic procedure shaped by decades of power politics, privileging the Security Council’s five permanent members – China, France, Russia, the UK and the USA – which wield veto power over any candidate. This concentration of authority in the hands of five states means the secretary-general, who is meant to serve the people of all 193 UN member states, can be blocked by the leader of a single major power acting in their narrow political self-interest. Since the permanent Security Council members rarely agree, the result may be a compromise candidate who’s unlikely to confront any of the five.

While civil society’s campaigning secured public candidate hearings in 2016, the Security Council’s deliberations remain opaque. The process operates through secret straw polls where permanent members vote on coloured ballots that reveal potential vetoes. Candidates who might otherwise be well-qualified can be eliminated behind closed doors for reasons never made public, undermining the legitimacy of the process.

A complicating factor is the informal principle of regional rotation. The position has historically rotated between the UN’s five regional blocs: Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean and Western Europe and Others. Yet this rotation has been inconsistent and politically manipulated. Eastern Europe is the only region never to have provided a successful candidate, while there hasn’t been a Latin American secretary-general since 1991.

The rotation principle, while intended to ensure equitable representation, is exploited by major powers. The principle’s informal and non-binding nature allows the Security Council’s permanent members to invoke it selectively when it suits their interests, championing regional equity to support a preferred candidate or dismissing it as merely advisory when blocking candidates they don’t like from regions whose turn is supposedly due. This strategic inconsistency enables powerful states to narrow the field of viable candidates while maintaining a veneer of commitment to geographic diversity.

The upcoming selection

A recent UN resolution established a timeline for the upcoming selection: the race should kick off by December 2025, with between 12 and 15 months to complete the selection. The new secretary-general takes office on 1 January 2027.

The resolution also notes with regret that no woman has ever held the position and strongly encourages states to nominate women candidates. Its language goes a step further than last year’s Pact for the Future, which only encouraged member states to ‘consider nominating’ women. But it still falls short of the unequivocal commitment to getting a woman in the top job that civil society is campaigning for.

Transparency requirements have increased: for the first time, candidates must disclose their funding sources at nomination. But the resolution failed to include any guidance on civil society participation in the process. This could take the form of meetings between civil society and nominees at the UN, something the 1 for 8 billion campaign has repeatedly insisted on.

Gender equality and civic space

Last year the CEDAW Committee, which oversees the implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), issued General Recommendation 40 following consultation with states and civil society. The recommendation makes clear that women must have equal representation in all decision-making spaces – public, private, political, economic and digital – and gender parity should be the starting point rather than a long-term aspiration.

But women’s participation gives rise to increased risks for those involved. Women are being targeted in the repression of civic freedoms under way in most countries around the world. Governments are mobilising violence, detention and harassment against women activists. Right-wing populist and nationalist politicians and groups that attack gender equality and abortion rights are on the rise in many countries, unleashing hatred and violence against women who dare take a stance, to the extent that some female leaders have been forced to quit out of fear of their and their families’ lives.

An absence of recognition of feminist women leaders is one of the reasons why, of the 17 badly off-track Sustainable Development Goals that are supposed to be achieved by 2030, gender equality has seen the least progress. In this increasingly restrictive environment, a female secretary-general would send a powerful signal that the UN cares about gender equality and is leading the way to advance it.

The way forward

A feminist secretary-general should be someone with a political commitment to challenging gender-based discrimination and recognising how gender intersects with other layers of exclusion, such as disability, ethnicity, sexual orientation and social class. She would centre lived experiences of women and gender-diverse people who’ve been systematically excluded from global decision-making. She would challenge power structures rather than simply navigate them. She would understand that gender equality is central to every major challenge facing humanity.

To bring this about, the UN should ensure the selection process is genuinely inclusive, rigorous, transparent and feminist. This means states should only nominate women candidates, share information openly and in accessible formats, allow meaningful civil society input, base the selection on candidates’ proven track records of championing gender equality and demonstrating commitment to human rights, multilateralism, peace and sustainable development and appoint the candidate best able to provide global leadership without risk of undue influence or favour trading.

Reform of the selection process means confronting the Security Council’s grip on power. Civil society is calling for the General Assembly – representing all 193 member states – to assert greater authority over the appointment. It’s demanding an end to secret straw polls, transparency about how permanent members use their veto power and meaningful mechanisms for civil society participation throughout the process. Without these structural reforms, even a woman secretary-general could be constrained by the influence of a small group of powerful states.

The UN has an opportunity to actively overcome systemic biases against women and strike a blow against patriarchal structures. More than that, at a time when the UN and broader principles of multilateralism are under threat from the rise of nakedly transnational approaches to international cooperation, as the Trump administration is spearheading, the UN has the potential to demonstrate that multilateralism can be reformed, global governance can be made more democratic and the voices of all people – not just the representatives of the most powerful states – can reshape international cooperation. Doing so could help make the UN more ready to take on today’s huge global challenges.

The selection of the next UN secretary-general needs to break the glass ceiling. Doing so would show that the UN is capable of evolving to meet the growing demands of a changing world, unencumbered by 80 years of assumptions about who should hold power and how they should use it.

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