Intersectional Feminist Leadership Needed to Realise Global Goals

By Jesselina Rana
NEW YORK, Jul 18 2025 – In its 80-year history the UN has never once been led by a woman. As the international community convenes for the 2025 High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) to review progress on gender equality and other Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), this remains a fundamental hypocrisy at the heart of global governance. How can an institution that has systematically excluded women from its highest office credibly champion gender justice worldwide?

With the various SDGs under review this year – goal 3 (health), 5 (gender equality), 8 (decent work), 14 (life below water) and 17 (partnerships) – there’s a widening gap between the UN’s pledge to seek ‘evidence-based solutions’ to ‘leave no one behind’ and the lived reality of women, girls and excluded communities worldwide. Despite decades of rhetoric on inclusion, these groups remain systemically marginalised from meaningful power and access to decision-making.

This contradiction between rhetoric and reality reflects a deeper power imbalance across the world that undermines the credibility and the effectiveness of efforts to address pressing global challenges.

CIVICUS’s State of Civil Society Report paints a picture of a disturbing rollback of progress on gender justice that spans continents and contexts. In Afghanistan, the Taliban have institutionalised a system of gender apartheid. In the USA, the Trump administration has drastically curtailed access to reproductive healthcare. Globally, the freeze on USAID’s health funding is projected to deny 11.7 million of the world’s most excluded women access to contraception, leading to over 4.2 million unintended pregnancies and more than 8,300 preventable maternal deaths. In Russia, the state’s campaign against ‘child-free propaganda’ represents its latest attempt to control women’s choices and repress LGBTQI+ people.

According to UN experts, Palestinian women and girls have faced sexual violence in detention, including being strip-searched by Israeli soldiers. In China, women’s rights activists have been imprisoned for ‘inciting subversion of state power’. Meanwhile, authorities in Ghana, Kenya, Mali and Uganda have introduced harsh anti-LGBTQI+ laws under the guise of protecting family values.

These global trends and imbalances are exacerbated by attacks on civic space, restricting civil society’s ability to challenge discriminatory laws and practices and dramatically increasing risks to the safety and lives of those who dare to resist. According to the CIVICUS Monitor, a collaborative initiative tracking civic space worldwide, over 70 per cent of the world’s population lives in countries where civic space is severely restricted. Only six out of 37 countries participating in Voluntary National Reviews at this year’s HLPF – the Bahamas, the Czech Republic, Finland, Japan, Micronesia and St Lucia – have open civic space. Civic freedoms are being crushed precisely when public participation is most desperately needed.

Even in the face of persistent failings in global governance and multilateral systems, feminist leadership continues to deliver where institutions fall short. As the UN marks the 25th anniversary of its Women, Peace and Security agenda, its most powerful legacy lies not in policy declarations, but in the actions of women who have transformed its vision into reality from Colombia to Sudan and Myanmar to Ukraine, contributing to peace agreements, defending rights under attack and rebuilding communities. Their leadership is often intersectional, crisis-tested and grounded in lived realities – precisely the evidence-based solutions needed to truly leave no one behind.

Today, the most effective responses to pressing global needs – climate resilience, democratic renewal and gender justice – are coming from the grassroots. Feminist movements, particularly in the global south, are already delivering on the SDGs, despite restricted civic space, chronic underfunding and persistent sidelining by patriarchal power structures locally to globally.

Across every metric that matters – from peace sustainability to economic resilience, from climate adaptation to democratic governance – feminist leadership works. Yet the institutions tasked with solving global challenges continue to exclude the leaders who’ve proven most effective at delivering solutions. If the UN80 Initiative is truly aimed at reasserting the value of multilateralism, it must centre the voices of women and excluded groups in policymaking and implementation.

The 2025 HLPF should offer a moment of reckoning. States can continue the charade of promoting gender equality while perpetuating gender exclusion at the highest levels, or they can finally align their actions with their rhetoric.

Through the 1 for 8 Billion campaign, civil society is calling for multilateral structures to be reimagined. This is not a call for incremental change or token gestures: it’s a demand for transformation. The world can’t afford another 80 years of male-dominated leadership at the UN while women and excluded communities bear the disproportionate brunt of global crises. The selection process for the next UN Secretary-General must be transparent and inclusive, and the role should be held by an intersectional feminist woman who leads with courage and holds truth to power.

Jesselina Rana is UN advisor at CIVICUS, the global civil society alliance.

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