Attack of the 50 Ft. Women: From man-made mess to a better future – the truth about global inequality and how to unleash female potential. Catherine Mayer

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СКАЧАТЬ the uncertainty around the UK’s post-Brexit future, one thing is clear: Britain will soon be led by a woman, its first female prime minister since Margaret Thatcher left office in 1990,’ an article on its website declared. ‘Female heads of state have become common everywhere, it seems, but in the United States.’⁴

      In reality, May added to a total of female world leaders – including elected heads of government, elected heads of state and women performing both roles – that for all their stature could still fit into a minibus. There are female leaders in Bangladesh, Chile, Croatia, Estonia, Germany, Liberia, Lithuania, Malta, Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Namibia, Nepal, Norway, Poland, Serbia, Taiwan and the UK – that’s just 17 out of the world’s 144 full or partial democracies, or 18 if we include the estimable Nicola Sturgeon who heads Scotland’s devolved government.

      Female leaders are less common globally than natural redheads are in Sturgeon’s own country; and redheads in Scotland, contrary to popular imagination, are not common at all, a flame-haired cohort amounting to around 13 per cent of the total population. Redheads and female leaders stand out, so we imagine their numbers to be much higher. Fifty-three democracies elect a president and a prime minister, and in all but nine of these nations, both roles are held by men. That means female leaders still comprise just 11.8 per cent of all world leaders, 12.5 per cent with Sturgeon.

      The rarity of female leaders skews any gender ranking that includes female heads of state or government as a measure of equality. Consider the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report. The annual report seeks to judge the gulf between male and female citizens in each country surveyed by combining national performance scores attained in four categories: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment. The health and survival category illustrates the wider danger of such rankings, taking into account just two sets of statistics: sex ratios at birth and healthy life expectancy. This provides useful information about divergent male and female health outcomes for diseases, but is a tool blunt to the point of inutility for assessing, for example, the level or impact of violence against women and girls. The last of the categories examines not only the make-ups of parliaments and governments but also ‘the ratio of women to men in terms of years in executive office (prime minister or president) for the last 50 years’. This helps to explain how in 2016 the Republic of Ireland strutted its stuff in sixth place, behind the Nordic countries and Rwanda, an unlikely feat that provoked eye-rolls among Irish women.⁵

      When Mary Robinson became Ireland’s first female President in 1990, she saluted female voters ‘who instead of rocking the cradle, rocked the system’. Seven years later Ireland elected a second female President, Mary McAleese. She served until 2011. Both women used the platform to promote gender equality, but Irish Presidents have severely limited executive powers and instead deploy what McAleese termed ‘moral or pastoral’ influence. The Irish system did get something of a rocking, though, and not just because of the Marys. Before Ireland’s economic miracle proved a bubble, a wash of cheap money swept away some old features of the social and political landscape and lured back to the country a diaspora with expanded ambitions for women.

      Even so, this shake-up was nowhere near fierce enough to fully dislodge the intertwined legacies of the Irish uprising and Catholicism. Revolutions often follow a pattern. The French Revolution and the Arab Spring both offered hope to the women who helped to instigate them, but swiftly abandoned any goals of female emancipation. Ireland’s revolution appeared to embrace the women who fought as equals alongside men, but went on to betray them. On Easter Monday 1916, rebel leader Patrick Pearse delivered a proclamation of independence on the steps of Dublin’s post office, promising ‘religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens’, and making explicit that these rights included suffrage for women. This vision shimmered for six days only. British forces quelled the Rising and executed Pearse. The remaining independence leaders focused ever more narrowly on the goal of ditching British rule, and doled out an earthly reward to the clergy who supported their efforts, enshrining ‘the special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church as the guardian of the Faith’ in Ireland’s 1937 constitution. As a result, Ireland didn’t permit divorce until 1995 and has yet to legalise abortion except when the mother’s life is in danger.

      Ireland’s female Presidents represented not change but the desire for change. The fact of a female leader is no guarantee that women are thriving, and that means the gender rankings that count them are fallible. Nevertheless, treated with caution and stripped of congratulatory messaging about how well women are doing – which we really are not – rankings still provide a useful guide.

      The Nordic countries always ride high, and deserve to do so, on the basis of measures such as female educational attainment and participation in the workforce. Their record of putting women into top offices is indeed noteworthy – by comparison to the exceptionally poor record in other parts of the world. Women have led Denmark and Finland – if only once – while Iceland has voted in, at different times, a female President and female Prime Minister. Erna Solberg, Norway’s current Prime Minister, is the nation’s second woman in the role.

      The unlikely outlier is Sweden. This apparently egalitarian and liberally minded Scandi society has yet to elect a female premier. Stability – the goal of most governments and a marked feature of Sweden since it pulled itself out of the financial crisis that roiled the early 1990s – must share some of the blame. It feels good to live in a stable society if you inhabit a comfortable corner of that society, but stability can also function as a drag on progress. If political parties keep performing to expectation, they tend to stick with existing leaders and leadership formulae. It is only when things go wrong that people consider more radical change or that change simply forces its way through. This rule applies at national level too. Developing countries often prove more porous for women than long-established democracies, and a significant proportion of the countries that now have female presidents or premiers have experienced profound political and social upheavals in their recent pasts.

      When crises loom, women sometimes climb. Brexit brought Theresa May to power. Michelle Bachelet became Chile’s first female President while memories of General Pinochet’s dictatorship were still raw. Park Geun-hye, South Korea’s first female President, won office after a spate of corruption scandals, dwindling growth rates and amid mounting tensions on the Korean Peninsula. The National Assembly voted to impeach her in December 2016 in the wake of a scandal centred on a close female friend alleged to have leveraged their relationship for personal gain. At the start of her trial on corruption charges in May 2017, the judge asked Park to state her occupation. ‘I don’t have any,’ she said. Her fall is now widely cited in South Korea as proof that women are unfit to lead.

      The challenges facing any female leader when she reaches the summit are profound. Those who come to power amid turbulence, denied the protections of benign economic cycles and the diligent work of predecessors, struggling to control parties engaged in internecine warfare, are more vulnerable still. Sometimes the ink has not yet dried on their official stationery before the tumbrels arrive. This is the glass-cliff syndrome mentioned earlier.

      In 11 countries, a woman led for less than a year. Female leaders in Austria, Ecuador and Madagascar broke records for the shortest tenure in top jobs, lasting just two days apiece. Canada may have a self-declared feminist at the helm in Justin Trudeau but the nation’s only female Prime Minister, Kim Campbell, managed just four months in office before losing a general election. ‘Gee,’ she deadpanned, ‘I’m glad I didn’t sell my car.’

      The female leadership minibus lost a passenger in 2016, when Brazil defenestrated its first female president. Dilma Rousseff had taken over as the economy began to stall after a period of heady growth attributed to her male predecessor but reliant on buoyant Chinese demand and rising oil prices. Her impeachment for alleged financial irregularities and involvement in a bribery scandal linked to the state oil company Petrobras was not, as its architects claimed, the appropriate response of democratic politics to corruption. China’s СКАЧАТЬ