It is an extraordinary idea. But there is one room in the United Nations that no woman has ever occupied. Since the organisation was founded in 1945, every Secretary-General has been a man. That fact has been repeated so often that it can begin to sound almost inevitable. It isn’t.

This year, for the first time, women are not simply being discussed as a possibility. They are serious contenders for the organisation’s highest office. The second Security Council straw poll, held on 21 August, put Guyana’s Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett in first place with eight “encourage” votes. Costa Rica’s Rebeca Grynspan and Argentina’s Rafael Grossi each received seven. The contest remains open, and the decisive political negotiations are still to come.

The next Secretary-General will be selected in 2026, succeeding António Guterres, whose term ends on 31 December. The new Secretary-General will begin a five-year term on 1 January 2027. But this is about much more than succession. It is about power.

Who has traditionally been trusted with it? Who has been allowed to exercise it? Who gets to define what leadership looks like? And, perhaps most importantly, can an institution created in a very different world finally challenge some of the assumptions about power with which it was created?

I have spent enough time in political life to know that being in the room is not the same as having power in the room. That distinction matters here. If a woman becomes the first woman Secretary-General, something historic will undoubtedly have happened. But the real question is what happens next.

Nine Men, Eighty Years

From Trygve Lie in 1946 to António Guterres today, nine men have held the office of Secretary-General. Their selections reflect the history of international politics itself: Cold War rivalries, regional considerations, compromises between major powers and, repeatedly, the influence of the veto.

Dag Hammarskjöld emerged in 1953 after other candidates failed to secure agreement. In 1981, a prolonged contest eventually produced Javier Pérez de Cuéllar as a compromise candidate after the candidacies of Kurt Waldheim and Salim Ahmed Salim encountered repeated vetoes. In 1996, Boutros Boutros-Ghali failed to secure a second term after the United States vetoed his reappointment despite substantial support elsewhere in the Security Council.

The personalities changed and the geopolitical realities changed, but one structural reality remained: the Secretary-General could exercise international authority only after navigating the interests of the great powers.

Hannah Arendt’s understanding of power is useful here. She distinguished power from coercion and saw legitimate power as something created when people act together. Institutions give political power continuity, but they also carry with them the assumptions of the worlds in which they were created.

The United Nations was established in 1945 in a political world overwhelmingly governed by men. The question for 2026 is not why that was the case then. It is how much of that political imagination still survives today.

The Race of 2026

The current competition gives that question an urgency it has not had before. The first Security Council straw poll took place on 30 July, with Rebeca Grynspan leading the field. In the second poll, on 21 August, Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett moved ahead with eight “encourage” votes, while Grynspan and Rafael Grossi each received seven.

The numbers are close and the race remains open. But something important has already changed. Women are no longer standing at the margins of this race as representatives of an aspiration. They are competing seriously for power. That distinction matters.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote about women being treated as the “Other”. There is something revealing in the way history has treated the office of Secretary-General. Nine men could successively occupy the position without routinely being described as male Secretaries-General. Their gender disappeared into the norm. A woman elected in 2026 would immediately become the first woman Secretary-General.

What has traditionally possessed power can come to look universal, while what has historically been excluded from power continues to be treated as exceptional. Yet there is another question we should ask: there is no single experience of being a woman in political life.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty challenged approaches to women that separate gender from geography, culture, class and histories of colonial and global power. That matters enormously for an organisation whose very purpose is to represent the world. It is not enough to ask whether women are finally entering global leadership. We should also ask which experiences of the world enter with them.

What Happens Next?

The next stages of the contest will tell us much about how power really operates. A candidate ultimately needs at least nine votes in the fifteen-member Security Council, with no veto from any of its five permanent members, to secure the Council’s recommendation. The Council then recommends a candidate to the General Assembly, which formally appoints the Secretary-General under Article 97 of the UN Charter.

The informal straw polls are designed to indicate where support lies, but the ballots do not distinguish publicly between the votes of permanent and elected members. The ballots are destroyed and no official record of the results is kept.

As the process develops, the position of the P5 will become increasingly important. And this is where the glass ceiling becomes geopolitical. A woman can have exceptional diplomatic experience, international credibility and significant support. She can be entirely capable of leading the organisation. But she must still navigate an architecture of power established at the end of the Second World War. Five states retain extraordinary influence over who leads an organisation of 193 Member States.

That is why we need to be careful about what we mean when we talk about breaking the glass ceiling.

A woman may break the gendered ceiling of the United Nations without breaking the architecture of power underneath it.

Why Has There Never Been a Woman?

Perhaps this is the more important question. The United Nations has placed gender equality at the heart of its wider ambitions. Its contemporary selection process is considerably more open than it once was. Nominations are public. Candidates provide vision statements and curricula vitae. They participate in public dialogues before the General Assembly and Security Council.

And yet the highest office has remained exclusively male. Mary Wollstonecraft’s arguments about opportunity and judgement, made more than two centuries ago, remain relevant. We cannot fairly judge the abilities of people who have historically been denied the opportunities through which those abilities might be demonstrated.

After eighty years, the absence of a woman Secretary-General cannot credibly be explained by an absence of women capable of leading.

Marcela Lagarde’s work on women’s autonomy and power takes us further. There is a difference between formal equality and substantive power. An institution can proclaim equality in its principles while continuing to reproduce inequality in the way authority is actually distributed.

Anyone who has experienced political life will understand that distinction. Getting through the door is one thing. Having influence once you are inside is another. Women have made extraordinary advances in parliaments, governments and diplomacy, but presence is not the same as power.

Power means being able to shape the agenda, influence negotiations, change outcomes and participate meaningfully in the decisions that determine political direction. So the question should no longer be whether a woman is capable of leading the United Nations. It should be why, after nine successive selections, international power has continued to reproduce itself in the same gendered form.

Power Behind Closed Doors

Here the United Nations faces an uncomfortable paradox. The public side of the selection process has become considerably more transparent. Candidates present their visions openly and answer questions from governments and civil society. Yet when the process reaches one of its most consequential stages, the doors close.

Security Council straw polls are confidential. Members mark candidates as “encourage”, “discourage” or “no opinion”. The results are not officially published, no formal record is retained and the ballots are destroyed.

There is an obvious argument for confidentiality. Diplomacy often depends upon allowing governments to speak frankly without every position immediately becoming public. But confidentiality and accountability are not always the same thing.

Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own offers an unexpectedly useful metaphor here. Woolf was not concerned simply with being allowed through a door. She was concerned with the independence necessary to have a voice and to exercise it freely. That distinction travels remarkably well from literature to politics.

Women have entered virtually every room in international diplomacy, but entering the room and possessing authority within it are not the same thing. For those of us who care about women’s leadership, this is an important distinction. The unfinished task is no longer simply getting women a place at the table. It is making sure that women have a genuine role in deciding what is discussed at that table, how decisions are reached, whose voices are heard and what kinds of leadership are valued.

The United Nations therefore has a question to answer about its own legitimacy. An institution that asks governments to embrace transparency, participation and equality should also be prepared to examine honestly how those principles operate within its own structures of power.

Breaking the Glass Ceiling and What Comes After

Electing the first woman Secretary-General would be historic. It would matter to women and girls who have spent generations being told, explicitly or implicitly, that some rooms were not meant for them. But I do not believe we should confuse a historic moment with a transformed institution. Breaking the glass ceiling is important, but breaking a ceiling is not the same as changing the building.

The argument for a woman Secretary-General should never be that women are naturally more peaceful, more compassionate or better at consensus than men. We should be wary of replacing one stereotype with another. The stronger argument is much simpler: women are half of humanity.

Women have lived, worked and led through conflict, poverty, migration, diplomacy, business, government, civil society and international institutions. They bring experiences and perspectives that have too often been missing from the rooms where the world’s biggest decisions are made. That does not mean every woman thinks alike. Quite the opposite. There is no single female experience, just as there is no single male experience. Geography, culture, class, history and circumstance all shape how we see the world. That diversity is a strength.

And it matters particularly now. The next Secretary-General will inherit wars, geopolitical fragmentation, rivalry between major powers and declining confidence in international institutions. The United Nations will need a leader capable of defending principle without abandoning dialogue, of mediating between powers without becoming captive to them, and of demonstrating that multilateralism can still deliver when confrontation so often seems easier.

A woman leading the United Nations would therefore be significant not simply because she is a woman. It would be significant because, after eighty years, the definition of who can occupy that position would finally have changed. But I would go further. We should not celebrate simply because a woman has finally been allowed into the room. We should ask whether she has the authority to change what happens inside it.

That is the real test.

The United Nations rightly asks its Member States to embrace equality, participation and transparency. It should be willing to look honestly at its own structures of power and ask whether they reflect those same principles. If the United Nations chooses its first woman Secretary-General, one of international politics’ most enduring glass ceilings will finally have been broken. It will be a moment worth celebrating, but it should not be the end of the conversation.

Because the following morning, the wars, geopolitical rivalries, veto and old architecture of power will still be there. The woman who enters that office will still have to navigate them.

That is why the question I would leave with the United Nations is not simply: Can a woman lead the United Nations? We already know the answer. The real question is whether the United Nations itself is ready to change.

Women have been waiting eighty years to enter the room.

Perhaps now it is time to ask what happens when they begin to change it.

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Tasmina Ahmed Sheikh OBE