The impressive town hall of the Belgian city of Leuven is currently getting a huge make-over, including the over 800 sculptures on the in- and outside of the magnificent building. Some of these sculptures date from the fifteenth century, but most of the ones on the facade were actually added during the nineteenth century. Out of 236 sculptures proudly adorning the outside, only sixteen represent women. Fast forward to the end of 2024 when the Belgian federal government finally presented its long-awaited cabinet. It consists of fifteen members, of which only four were and are women. To add insult to injury, the first official photograph showed the female cabinet members in the back row, while two of them were invisible because male colleagues literally threw a shadow on them.
The fifth goal of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals concerns Gender Equality. To obtain this broad ambition, it is subdivided into nine targets, each focussing on different aspects to ultimately eradicate gender inequality by 2030. With only four years to go, the road still seems very long. In fact, some targets appear to be sliding ever further away, even in developed countries. Health and reproductive rights are increasingly restricted and violence against women is all too often trivialised. Femicide rarely occurs unexpectedly and is usually the sad outcome of a long list of incidents not deemed serious enough for action to be taken.
The fifth target of the Gender Equality SDG reads as follows: Ensure women’s full participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making in political, economic and public life. The road to gender equality in all these fields is not a straight one ahead. Taking Belgium’s example again, the country’s previous federal cabinet consisted of ten women out of a total of nineteen ministers. The current cabinet of four out of fifteen ministers is a serious step back with regards to gender equality. While there are hundreds of organizations working in the field of gender, two of them specifically monitor the political field worldwide. UN Women was only established in 2010, although it builds on the work of four separate, now defunct, entities within the UN system: Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW); International Research and Training Institute on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women (INSTRAW); Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women (OSAGI); United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). The Council of Women World Leaders will celebrate its thirtieth anniversary in 2026 and was co-founded by Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, Mary Robinson and Laura Liswood. It is a network of current and former presidents and prime ministers, among whom is the first woman in the world to be democratically elected president. While Iceland may have trumped the rest of the world, others – like Ireland – followed suit. At the end of 2025, however, there were still 107 countries which have (repeatedly) failed to elect their first female head of state. Only 29 countries had women serving as Heads of State and/or Government, with Barbados and Iceland having both a female President and a female Prime Minister. These countries with female leadership were spread across all continents. The same gender equality or inequality in cabinets and parliaments does not restrict itself to one or a few continents either. Europe, for example, boasts some of the highest numbers of female ministers per cabinet, but also lists one country (Hungary) with an all-male cabinet. Rwanda has the highest percentage of female parliamentarians (63.8%). In contrast, not a single woman is seated in the parliaments of Oman, Tuvalu and Yemen. It is a varied picture, sometimes bleak, sometimes rosy.
Equal participation and opportunities do not restrict themselves to the political domain. Women should get the same access to top business positions. So should they when it comes to leadership in civil society. As prime advocate of the Sustainable Development Goals, it is therefore interesting to take a closer look at how the United Nations and its related bodies perform in the field of gender equality. The UN organigram lists some 40 organizations, funds, programmes, institutes and/or commissions. At the start of 2026, only fifteen of those have a woman as head. One of them is Shaika Al Nowais, the first ever woman to lead the tourism body of the UN. The UN Development Programme, however, chose another male head as its tenth Administrator late 2025. The count now stands at nine men versus only one woman to ever lead the UNDP. UNEP – the UN Environment Programme – has a distinctly better record with four men versus three women. The first nine Directors-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization were all men, but now the second female Director-General leads UNESCO. The same goes for the World Health Organization and the International Monetary Fund, which each had seven male Directors-General as opposed to two female heads. There are, however, still a number of UN entities which have never been led by a woman, not the least of which is the United Nations itself. The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), International Labour Organization (ILO) and World Bank are for now also exclusive men-only clubs. The United Nations System-wide Gender Equality Acceleration Plan obviously still has some in-house work to do as well.
The UN website mentions a “sluggish progress” regarding gender equality in women’s participation and equal opportunities for leadership. At the current rate, gender equality will not be obtained for at least another 100 years. Occasionally however, another glass ceiling is broken and a glimmer of hope appears. In 2026, Professor Ellen Moons became the first woman to lead the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences since its foundation in 1739. Next time the Nobel Prizes for Physics, Chemistry and Economic Sciences are awarded, a woman will have been at the helm of these deliberations. A small step towards Gender Equality.
Issue #22 – February 2026