Where are the west’s female leaders?
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Version 0 of 1. A report this week has exposed how progress towards gender equality is slowing down in the west. The Global Gender Gap Report showed that Europe has undergone the smallest change in terms of closing the gender gap. In terms of political empowerment, from Britain to Austria to Spain, in only nine years, women’s rankings have sunk sharply. By contrast, the region with the largest positive change is Latin America where, just last weekend, Brazil re-elected a woman president, Dilma Rousseff. Also known as the world’s most powerful feminist, Rousseff will lead the world’s seventh-largest economy and fifth-largest nation for another four years. Voters in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and the Caribbean have also done a better job of electing women presidents and prime ministers. Today, only three of the 22 female heads of government are in the west (Germany, Denmark and Norway). It’s commonly perceived that the western world is at the forefront of the campaign for women’s rights. State bodies such as the British Department for International Development, organisations such as the Cherie Blair Foundation and celebrities such as Madonna and Angelina Jolie all invest in women’s empowerment in the developing world, which is often seen as lagging well behind. But in truth, as the survey shows, when it comes to having women at the top levels of political leadership, industrialised western countries actually lag behind developing ones. Of 142 countries, Britain came just 63rd for the number of women in parliament and 75th for the number of women in ministerial jobs. The US was 83rd and 25th. So what’s gone wrong with the struggle for equality in the west? A poll of 11- to 17-year-old girls in the US that was published on Tuesday found that 74% of girls believe that if they pursued a political career, they would “have to work harder than a man to be taken seriously”. Perhaps not so surprising in a country that has never elected a female head of government. What’s more, the EU – not included as a region in the report – is chronically male-biased. In October, despite EU commission president Jean-Claude Juncker’s pleas for member states to put female candidates forward for his team, he ended up with only nine women representing the interests of Europeans. As Juncker put it himself, the outcome was “pathetic”. It seems that, while positioning itself as the region that champions gender equality, the west has failed to look in the mirror. If it did, it would spot an ongoing revivalism of old, patriarchal, conservative values and a backlash against women’s rights that makes it difficult for female leaders to rise as they should. To challenge the status quo so that future generations of girls can feel comfortable competing for office in equal measure, perhaps the west should look to countries that have been more welcoming to female heads of government such as Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and Costa Rica. The biggest challenge women face today is how to identify with the idea of being powerful – because the more women identify with “powerfulness”, the more will seek leadership positions. Let me be clear, women are not politically equal to men in any region of the world. Pathological male dominance is a global pandemic that feminists in every part of the world need to tackle. But since the west plays a leading role in shaping women’s political movements globally, it is hypocritical for it to imply that it is a beacon of exemplary behaviour. There has been some progress in Europe. In Sweden, for instance, the Feminist Initiative (FI) party performed strongly in the country’s recent elections. In fact, ranking in the top five of the gender report and with two of Europe’s three female heads of state, Scandinavia generally speaking is a shining light for western women. During her first UN talk as Brazil’s president, Rousseff said: “For the first time in the history of the United Nations, a female voice opens the general debate … It is the voice of democracy, of equality. I am certain, ladies and gentlemen, that this will be the women’s century.” Now, I have long been a collector of badass moments in women’s political history but with those words, Rousseff unfurled a vision of unprecedented feminine power. A century where women occupy their deserved place as half of the leaders of the world? What an idea to unleash in a chamber imbued with decades of male privilege. Thank you, Dilma. But despite this optimism, the new survey leads me to fear that, rather than a female century, we are heading toward yet another male one. |