Only in Scandinavia, Britain, Poland and New Zealand can the election of a female leader be seen as anything close to an uncommented norm. Elsewhere, it remains an outlier event. In Africa and the Middle East, massive cultural barriers block progress.
If, and it remains a mighty big if, Kamala Harris defeats Donald Trump in November she will become the first female president in the 248-year history of the American republic. She is already the first woman to hold the vice presidency, and only the second female major party nominee for the top job, after Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Aside from those two, Geraldine Ferraro, as Walter Mondale’s losing VP candidate in 1984, and Sarah Palin, who performed the same role for John McCain in 2008, are the only women even on the scoresheet for the two major offices in the nation after more than 60 elections.
So, the USA’s track record in political gender equality is poor. As, somewhat surprisingly, is liberal Canada to its north, with only a mere four months of Kim Campbell in 1993 disturbing the all-male sequence of prime ministers.
As I traverse the global terrain on this subject, an important note is that in many countries, the head of state is not the political leader. In all the instances quoted, I’m referring to the permanent (not acting) executive heads of government – the real power holders, whether it be a president, a prime minister or a chancellor.
I am also only referencing democratically elected leaders – not the imperious queens of past ages. (And, getting my excuses in, this broad sweep is not comprehensive; there will be some omissions.)
SA lags behind
In South Africa, of course, we have yet to break our duck in terms of a female leader. It’s been men only – 14 of them – who have led the nation since Union in 1910, in either the old or the new dispensation.
The rest of the continent isn’t much better. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was the first anywhere in Africa when she won two consecutive terms as Liberian president from 2005. Subsequently, Joyce Banda in Malawi and the current Tanzanian president Samia Suluhu Hassan are the only other women in 54 African nations to significantly follow in her footsteps.
I think most would assume that places like Scandinavia or New Zealand would have been the first standard bearers in female political leadership, but, in fact, it was in the area of the Indian sub-continent where many of the pioneers are to be found. In every instance, they worked off power bases created by their husbands or fathers. And, in every instance, their stories are bloody ones.
The first woman ever to head a democratically elected government was Sirimavo Bandaranaike in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1960. She stepped into the shoes of her assassinated husband and won three terms.
The second was Indira Gandhi, daughter of India’s founding father Jawaharlal Nehru. First elected in 1966, she was assassinated in 1984 after imposing a brutal state of emergency.
In Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto became the first woman elected to lead an Islamic country in 1988. Her father had been prime minister and was executed by the military authorities. She, too, was assassinated in 2007.
And in Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, the daughter of the nation’s first president who was killed during a military coup in 1975, has just been run out of office by angry protestors after a total of 19 years in power.
Just south of Bangladesh, in Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi survived an assassination attempt and imprisonment before gaining both the Nobel Peace Prize and political power. She is now back in prison.
Golda Meir a first
By my reckoning, the first woman elected anywhere as a national leader without any sort of family lineage to assist her was Golda Meir, who became Israel’s only female leader in 1969 and led the country through the Yom Kippur War.
Margaret Thatcher’s reign in the UK from 1979 to 1990 (I was there and she felt like a monarch!) was a definitive landmark in gender equality in politics, much as she resented ever being described as a feminist. She was a global player and carried both a loud voice and a big stick, usually to beat trade unions with.
The UK, subsequently, has had two more female prime ministers, even if one famously didn’t last longer than a head of lettuce. (Interestingly, all three female UK prime ministers have come from the Conservative Party, while the theoretically more socially liberal Labour Party is yet to elect a woman as leader.)
In Europe, the record is very mixed. Angela Merkel was a formidable chancellor of Germany for 16 years, and Giorgia Melloni recently broke the glass ceiling in Italy, but countries like France, Spain, the Netherlands and Greece have not yet had a single female leader.
In Eastern Europe, the Poles, surprisingly to me, have had three, and the likes of Croatia and Romania have managed one. The Russians, inevitably, have never come close to making the big step.
A vintage year
2021 was a vintage year globally for female political leaders. Merkel was the dominant force in Europe; Jacinda Ardern, NZ’s third female prime minister, was a prominent international figure; and all four Scandinavian nations were run by women.
But that’s pretty much been reversed. Merkel and Ardern have been replaced by pasty males and only Mette Frederiksen of Denmark still holds the fort among the Nordics.
Australia has had only one female leader, Julia Gillard, who became prime minister in 2010 and was treated in an appallingly sexist way by opponents, critics and the media. She is defined by her epic 2012 parliamentary speech on misogyny.
In Asia, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand and the Philippines all get ticks for female leaders, but the big guns – China and Japan – seemingly are light years away. The Middle East is pretty much a blank for both female leaders, except for Golda Meir, and for democracy. Kyrgyzstan has had a female leader but the rest of the Stans have work to do.
Latin America is, somewhat counter-intuitively, fertile ground. Mexico has just elected its first woman president in Claudia Sheinbaum, and Honduras and Peru both have incumbents. Brazil, Chile, Nicaragua and others have all been there and done that.
In Argentina, in spite of her musical fame, Evita Perón was only ever vice-president, but Juan Perón’s third wife, Isabel, did hold the reins of power, until being removed in a military coup, and Christina Fernández de Kirchner succeeded her husband in the presidency in 2007.
There are some pretty blatant conclusions to be drawn from this ramble across the gender globe.
Cultural barriers
Only in Scandinavia, Britain, Poland and New Zealand can the election of a female leader be seen as anything close to an uncommented norm. Elsewhere, it remains an outlier event. In Africa and the Middle East, massive cultural barriers block progress.
And in too many places, a family heritage or connection is still too damned important for women to ever succeed politically.
A key factor remains that female politicians (and their personal relationships and appearance) are still scrutinised in biased, gender-specific ways. And the language used by many commentators about them remains stuck in the sexist “Iron Lady” era.
The truth is that women elected to any office still carry their entire gender with them in ways that men do not. Should Kamala Harris move into the Oval Office and, in some or several ways, prove not up to the task, there will be resounding views expressed that this demonstrates women are not fit for the role.
This, while the manifold failures of successive men in the same position do not seem to ever disqualify the next privileged male from garnering millions of votes. DM