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Back in 1995, the Bond film franchise was shaken and stirred when Dame Judi Dench made her debut as the bourbon-drinking spymaster M in GoldenEye. In a tense first exchange with Pierce Brosnan’s 007, the Bond matriarch declared: “I think you are a sexist, misogynist dinosaur. A relic of the Cold War.” This statement obliterated the popular perception of the female spy. The image of the scantily clad honeypot was blown away, and the professional female intelligence officer took centre stage.

Eon Productions’ refreshing decision to address the sexism in this bastion of on-screen British intelligence was inspired by the appointment of the first woman to head a UK intelligence agency, and it wasn’t SIS. In 1992, Dame Stella Rimington became the first female and first ‘open’ MI5 director general. Eliza (now Baroness) Manningham-Buller stepped into the role in 2002. Then, in 2023, Anne Keast-Butler made history as the first female director of GCHQ, the UK’s intelligence, cyber and security agency.

SIS is the last service to appoint a woman to take the helm. Historically, women have been underestimated and top jobs given to men. From the inception of the Secret Service Bureau in 1909, out of which SIS and the Security Service (MI5) were born, an army of loyal and discreet women had operated across the world under the camouflage of being a ‘secretary’. They fulfilled a range of important roles, such as encoding and decoding orders, writing propaganda, running agents and managing an emporium of secret information in the registries. Women also gave men a masterclass in how to be effective field agents and survive daring missions. A handful even succeeded in becoming intelligence officers before 1945, but they received less pay than their male colleagues (time has seen slow improvement on this score: a recent gender pay-gap report revealed the average pay for men in SIS is 7.6 per cent higher than that afforded to female employees). 

SIS chief Dick White believed ‘our secretaries need only two things: good legs and a good upbringing’

Despite women’s skill and talent for intelligence work, progress was glacial. Following the end of both world wars, SIS experienced a talent drain when women were released from their duties. Women faced a slow path to leadership, receiving opportunities only when their male bosses granted them. Appointed in 1956, SIS chief Dick White believed “our secretaries need only two things: good legs and a good upbringing”. The drive for change had to come from those making decisions at the top, namely men. It took until the early 2000s for SIS to realise that it had to move away from recruiting pale, male and somewhat stale candidates. A new kind of spy was needed. Recruits could no longer be found by tapping the shoulders of well-to-do public school or ex-military types. 

To stay ahead of its adversaries, SIS sought those who were less white, and women. Mothers were encouraged to apply, with the assurance that they would not be used as seductresses; those from minority communities were targeted with a special focus on recruits who spoke Arabic, Mandarin and Farsi, as well as one of the Afghan languages (Pashto and Dari). During his tenure as head of SIS (known as “C”) from 2014 to 2020, Sir Alex Younger encouraged further transformation by lowering the minimum recruitment age to 18. He hoped to show a new generation of young people, who possessed much-needed modern technical skills, that they could have a career in the Secret Intelligence Service.

However, it was Younger’s successor, Sir Richard Moore, who continued to modernise and finally orchestrate tangible reform. The former C, who stepped down last year, oversaw an ambitious plan to diversify the SIS workforce, ensuring three of his four director generals were women. He also remained true to his word on ending all-male shortlists for the appointment of future chiefs. Interviews were held at the beginning of May 2025, and the shortlist, so we were told, was whittled down to four worthy candidates. After a further cut, only two finalists remained – one insider and one outsider. Both were women.

A month later, Blaise Metreweli was announced as the 18th C. After taking office on 1 October 2025, the then-47-year-old career intelligence officer had the honour of breaking a century-old glass ceiling.

Metreweli’s appointment was undoubtedly based on merit. She is licensed to lead SIS into a new era, bridging the gap between human intelligence and digitally driven threats to Britain’s security. But when she signed her first internal memo in the traditional green ink, a singular honour was bestowed upon all those remarkable SIS women who had faced an uphill battle in their long fight for gender equality. Several of them would have made formidable female heads of SIS, had the old boys’ club been willing to break new ground.

Take the bold and brilliant Winnie Spink, the first SIS woman sent to Russia in 1916, who served in the British Intelligence mission in Petrograd. The gifted former suffragette was fluent in German and Russian, and had studied French at the Sorbonne. Personally interviewed by the first SIS chief, Mansfield Smith-Cumming, she accepted the Russian posting on 16 June 1916. Once there, she managed a mountain of paperwork generated from investigating and classifying every passenger travelling from Russia to Britain. She busily encoded and decoded messages, and typed reports, which sometimes ran to an exhausting 30,000 words. 

The 31-year-old was bright, bold and brave, possessing a quiet kind of courage and resilience – qualities that would see her through freezing temperatures, growing food shortages and world-shaking events, such as the Russian revolution in the following year. Like so many women in intelligence, Spink found herself in a strange position, as she was trusted to keep military and state secrets before she was deemed worthy of the vote.

She had kept a diary throughout her life and made several notes about the promiscuous mystic Grigori Rasputin, including his home address and the cafes he frequented. But, in one diary entry, she recorded that on the night Rasputin was murdered, 29 December 1916, she had taken a joy ride through the city in the mission’s only car with an unnamed driver, thereby providing British intelligence officers with an alibi, should the Tsar suspect that British agents might have been involved in Rasputin’s death. 

During the Second World War, another exceptionally able SIS operative, Kathleen Pettigrew, who declared late in life, “I was Miss Moneypenny but with more power”, rose to become one of the SIS chief’s trusted inner circle. Thousands of decoded Enigma messages received from Bletchley Park crossed the senior secretary’s desk, as well as 8,000 letters sent by the wartime C, Stewart Menzies. Pettigrew became so revered within SIS that no one questioned the presence of her pet parrot in the office.

The war created opportunities for other women too. The SIS’s “Lady in Tangiers” is one of a handful of identified early female officers. Margaret “Teddy” Dunlop operated under vice-consular cover, running a clandestine network of agents, and she did so with a toddler kicking at her heels. The SIS officer somehow managed to bend the rule that required women to leave the service if they got married – a draconian restriction that was finally removed in 1973.

The marriage bar did not prevent the talented Rita Winsor from serving in neutral Switzerland and Lisbon during the Second World War. Quick thinking, with a devious approach to problem-solving, the unorthodox officer got things done behind the scenes. She was a multilingual fixer who handled everything from running agents to overseeing the exfiltration of defectors. 

For two years leading up to the failed plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler in July 1944, Rita and her rather short and stubby colleague Graham Maingot ran an important German agent codenamed Whisky. Otto John was a young lawyer who worked for the German airline Lufthansa. The ardent anti-Nazi was a close associate of Claus von Stauffenberg, the leading conspirator who hoped to kill Hitler and liberate Nazi Germany. 

Between 1942 and 1944, John met Rita and her partner a dozen times, supplying them with detailed reports. However, in January 1944, SIS headquarters forbade any further meetings, declaring that “the war would now be decided by force of arms”. John returned to Berlin, and the German conspirators took action in March 1944, but failed to assassinate Hitler at his mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps. They failed a second time in July 1944, when Hitler escaped most of the bomb blast at his “Wolf’s Lair” field headquarters in Rastenburg, East Prussia. With Rita’s aid, Otto John escaped from Germany. She took charge of his clandestine travel arrangements and accommodation needs at various safe houses. After the war, John declared in his memoir that he owed his life to Rita.

Daphne Park came closest to breaking the glass ceiling in 1975, when she was appointed controller, western hemisphere, the highest post ever held by a woman in SIS. She joined the service in 1948 and during her clandestine career, was stationed in Vienna, Moscow, Léopoldville, Lusaka and Hanoi. Park was one of the first women to fulfil an operational SIS role, and she did so with an extreme sense of derring-do. During her posting as consul and first secretary in Léopoldville between 1959 and 1961, she mustered the courage to smuggle a defecting Congolese politician to safety in the boot of her tiny Citroen 2CV. 

These were some of the countless stories of amazing women who laid the ground for the appointment of SIS’s first female head. The new C, Metreweli had followed a standard path into SIS, stepping into the shadows in 1999. After studying anthropology at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where she rowed for the university, Metreweli applied to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and was diverted into espionage. Over half of her career was then spent in operational roles in Europe and the Middle East. An Arabic speaker, she served as a case officer and then an agent runner, doing so while raising a family. Like her forbearers, extraordinary work was made to look ordinary, but it was not without its challenges.

In 2022, she was interviewed by the Financial Times for an article about the secret lives of female SIS officers. At the time, she held the coveted role of head of technology, presiding over Q Section and developing secret gadgetry, weapons and disguises. Speaking under the pseudonym “Ada”, the SIS field agent turned technical specialist described how, on one overseas posting, she had enquired about the location of the Isofix points for her baby’s car seat in her armoured car. She recalled how “there was a lot of scratching of heads and people saying, ‘we haven’t had a request for one of those things before’. And actually, it turns out it’s very difficult to do.” Determined SIS technical officers eventually found a way. 

With fewer than a third of senior posts currently occupied by women in SIS, there is still work to be done. 

Claire Hubbard-Hall is a historian, author and broadcaster who specialises in the history of secret intelligence. Her debut book, Her Secret Service: The Forgotten Women of British Intelligence, is published in paperback by Weidenfeld & Nicolson