Is the world ready for a woman at helm of the United Nations?

With International Women’s Day in the rear view mirror, it might be an appropriate time to consider how much progress has been made in closing the gender gap at the United Nations and other international organizations. The picture is largely mixed, according to a new report, titled Women in Multilateralism 2025, by the GWL Voices, with increasing numbers of women filling senior positions in international organizations, but world governments lagging woefully behind, and the pathway to one of the U.N.’s most visible diplomatic post — the U.N. secretary-general — unattainable. “We believe that the times require a different type of leadership, a new approach to resolving the issues that we have before us,” said Susana Malcorra, a former Argentine foreign minister and senior U.N. official, who cofounded GWL Voices and serves as its president. “And if there is something that has not been done in 80 years it is [giving] an opportunity to a woman,” she told Devex. “There is a deep bench of potential women candidates that can really play that role.” Mister Ambassador Here at the U.N. headquarters — where diplomats and activists are meeting this month to mark the 30th anniversary of the landmark Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action on women’s rights — women represent a small percentage of top ambassadors, known as permanent representatives. Since the U.N.’s founding in 1945, only 208 of the more than 2,800 of the member states’ top ambassadors who served at the U.N. until 2024 were women. There were long stretches — 1947 to 1957 and 1964 to 1971 — when not a single woman held the title of permanent representative of a mission at the U.N. — though an Indian politician, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, served as the lone female head of delegation in 1946. Pandit was also the first woman to be appointed president of the U.N. General Assembly back in 1953. Only three other women have held that title. Some 73 of the U.N.’s 193 member states — including big powers like China, France, and Russia — have never had a woman lead their U.N. delegations. Sixty-four, including Canada, Israel, and Luxembourg, have appointed only one. The United States has appointed seven, more than any other country, according to a GWL tally. The representation of women in international governing boards — like executive boards at U.N. agencies — is also lacking. In 2024, women accounted for only 29% of positions on government-selected governing boards, down from 30% in 2023. Women accounted for less than 25% of board members at governing bodies at 11 organizations, including the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank Group. ‘14 suits and a skirt’ It’s not like gender equality hasn’t been on the agenda for very long. The founding architects of the U.N. Charter included a provision — Article 8 — stating that the U.N. “shall place no restriction on the eligibility of men and women to participate in any capacity and under conditions of equality in its principal and subsidiary organs.” But it was more than a decade before Agda V. Rössel, a Swede, became the first permanent representative to the U.N. in 1958. When Madeleine Albright, only the second American woman to lead the U.S. delegation at the U.N., arrived at Turtle Bay in 1993, she was the only woman in the 15-nation council, the August security club she referred to as “14 suits and a skirt.” In an effort to highlight the imbalance, she organized a luncheon club with all the U.N.’s female permanent representatives. There were five others. Since then, the situation has seen some improvement, with women accounting for 10% of all permanent representatives in 2007 and 21% in 2024. Once confirmed, U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York, will be the sixth Senate-confirmed female U.S. permanent representative to the U.N. in a row. U.S. President Donald Trump has only appointed women to the job — former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, Republican megadonor Kelly Craft, and Stefanik. There has been progress. In the 54 international organizations studied in the GWL survey, women held some 43% of senior jobs — 7% short of gender parity — but a considerable improvement on the past. Women held the top job at 44% of those organizations, up from 41% in 2023. But some have performed better than others. Some 40% of international organizations, including the African Development Bank, the Organization of American States, and the United Nations Industrial Organization, have never been run by women. Two major U.N. organizations — the U.N. Development Programme and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, with vacancies later this year — have only been led by one woman each — former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark and the late Japanese academic and diplomat Sadako Ogata, respectively. Madam Secretary-General Still, one of the most visible diplomatic jobs in the world — the U.N. secretary-general — has never been filled by a woman. In 2016, a broad slate of female candidates, including Clark, Malcora, and IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva, campaigned for the post, raising expectations that a woman might finally break diplomacy’s loftiest glass ceiling. But the council’s five permanent members — China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. — picked former Portuguese Prime Minister António Guterres for the job — twice. This time around, GWL has mounted its #MadamSecretaryGeneral campaign to rally global support for the selection of a female U.N. leader in 2026. “The fact that no woman has ever been elected Secretary-General is the most visible evidence of the legacy of gender exclusion that has characterized the leadership at the UN for eight decades,” according to the GWL report. Several female candidates from Latin America and the Caribbean — which has not held the top U.N. job since Peruvian diplomat Javier Pèrez de Cuèllar concluded a 10-year tenure at the end of 1991, are expected to launch campaigns. They include Mia Mottley, the charismatic Barbadian prime minister; Rebeca Grynspan, the Costa Rican politician who leads the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development; and María Fernanda Espinosa, a former minister of defense and foreign affairs of Ecuador, who serves as an executive director of GWL Voices. The effort to reach gender diversity is facing a new hurdle. Advances in reaching gender equity in hiring have been aided by programs designed to either level the playing field for women — for instance, through “gender blind” recruitment practices — or to ensure that women are considered for senior positions. For instance, the U.N. secretary-general requires that at least one woman candidate be included on short lists for some of the most senior positions in the U.N. system, according to U.N. officials. “We know what works: temporary special measures, such as quotas, targeted appointments, and parity goals…,” Guterres said at the opening of the Commission on the Status of Women session. At the U.N., he added, “we achieved and maintained gender parity among senior leadership at headquarters and around the world.” On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order — “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” — ordering an end to all federal funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, programs, which has been applied broadly to international organizations that receive U.S. funding. In recent weeks, U.S. diplomats have sought to weaken or strip out language encouraging states to nominate more women candidates for U.N. peacemaking jobs, including in the race for the U.N. secretary-general. In closed-door negotiations on a political declaration for the Commission on the Status of Women, Washington proposed softening a provision encouraging states to nominate qualified female candidates for the post. Instead, the U.S. proposed having states merely consider nominating women for the posts. Russia, meanwhile, proposed eliminating the provision altogether. The U.S. amendment, which might appear impossibly nuanced to a regular reader, was interpreted as a sign that the world’s most powerful veto-wielding power was encouraging more men to enter the race and compete for the job. It also provided a boost to a potential candidacy of Rafael Grossi, the Argentine head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who is expected to mount a run. “We are witnessing an aggressive backlash against gender equality – threatening hard-won progress on women’s human rights and fundamental freedoms,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said on March 7. “We cannot afford to stand still. We must push back against this pushback. We must secure women’s full, equal and meaningful participation in all decision-making processes – including on peace and security and humanitarian action.”