The official representative of the UN Secretary General, Farhan Haq, said that Ban Ki-moon is convinced that his successor should be a woman.
"He's said in several public venues that he thinks it's high time for the Secretary-General to be a woman," he said. "Of course, he's not going to offer any opinions about who should be selected, but certainly, the time for a female Secretary-General has come," TASS cited him as saying.
The list of possible candidates includes the current United Nations Development Programme Administrator, Helen Clark, the Director-General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, the President of Chile Michelle Bachelet, and the President of Lithuania Dalia Grybauskaite and the Prime Minister of Denmark Helle Thorning-Schmidt.
"He, of course, meets many women in very prominent positions in national politics and international politics and in the UN. Whether any of them actually run as candidates is up to them, of course," Haq noted.
