Aug. 18, 2026, 3:27 p.m. ET
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United Nations
In the public lobby of the U.N. headquarters building, visitors can peruse the portraits of recent secretaries-general of the world’s premier international governmental organization. All are men.
A few feet away hangs a display featuring “women who have shaped the United Nations” – Eleanor Roosevelt, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Amina Mohammed, and nearly two dozen more.
Yet as impressive as the exhibit is, it still feels like a consolation prize for the fact that in its 80 years of existence – and with nine secretaries-general – the U.N. has only elected men to its top leadership position.
In the United Nations’ 80 years, it has been led by nine secretaries-general, none of them women. But as the U.N. begins the process of electing a successor to António Guterres, pressure is mounting to shatter its glass ceiling. Four top candidates are women.
But now, as the world body moves to replace outgoing Secretary-General António Guterres by the end of the year, mounting pressure for a female “SG” aims to make this the year the U.N.’s glass ceiling is shattered.
And hopes are high that the 10th time will indeed be the charm. Four of the seven declared candidates for the job are female – with some having received encouraging early signs from within the Security Council’s arcane system for anointing a secretary-general.
“Whenever I’m asked, ‘Why a woman secretary-general?’ I say, ‘Why not?’” says Jean Krasno, chair of Woman SG, a New York-based group promoting election of a female secretary-general. “Women make up more than half the world’s population, and the U.N. was created based on principles of equity, equal rights, and opportunities for all. So this would be the U.N. living up to its ideals.”
But the professor of international relations at City College of New York says there are perhaps more powerful reasons why a woman would make a good, even great, leader of so complex an institution as the United Nations.
“Women all over the world have learned from the discrimination and barriers they’ve faced that, whether they’re running a family or a business or a whole country, they have to be strategic and diplomatic,” she says. “They need to know how to manage things, including people and finances,” she adds. “Those are all essential qualities for the job of secretary-general.”
Others present the campaign for a female SG in largely pragmatic terms.
“If the countries [of the Security Council] that are going to decide this are serious about wanting the most qualified people to apply, they have to be open to the half of the world’s population that are women,” says Esther Brimmer, a former assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs.
But beyond that, she says, electing a woman would be an energizing sign to women everywhere of expanding opportunity. Moreover, a woman as SG could provide a jolt to a global behemoth that is under intense pressure to reform, slim down, and become more nimble.
“A woman at the helm would be a much-needed symbol of change and fresh thinking,” says Dr. Brimmer, now a senior fellow in global governance at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.
The secretary-general is not elected democratically by the 193 nation-state members of the U.N. General Assembly, but is selected by the 15-member Security Council. And even within that smaller body, it’s the five veto-wielding permanent members – the United States, China, Russia, France, and Britain – that determine which candidate is ultimately presented to the General Assembly for a vote of approbation.
