Gender GapLeadershipResearch/Study

About One-Third of UN Member Countries Have Been Led by a Woman

According to a recent analysis from the Pew Research Center, 63 out of the 193 United Nations member countries have had a woman leader.

Currently, women are the heads of government in 13 UN member countries. Ten of these women are their country’s first female leaders. Notably, this count does not include President-elect Laura Fernández of Costa Rica, who will be sworn into office in May, as well as President Delcy Rodríguez of Venezuela and Prime Minister Sushila Karki of Nepal, who are leading their countries on an interim basis.

The first woman to lead a UN member country was Sirimavo Bandaranaike, who began her tenure as prime minister of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1960. Over the next few decades, progress slowed, but has risen steadily since the 1990s. The biggest single-year increase in women world leaders occurred in 2010, when women led for the first time in five countries: Australia, Costa Rica, Kyrgyzstan, Slovakia, and Trinidad and Tobago. In 2025, women became the head of government for the first time in Japan, Namibia, and Suriname.

Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados is the longest-serving woman currently in office, with a tenure of almost eight years. The longest-ever-serving woman leader of a UN member country is former Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who spent more than 20 total years in power before resigning and fleeing the country in 2024 following mass protests across the country.

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