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 slowdown and falling oil prices played a part. So did an inherent misogyny. Some of Dilma’s opponents agitated for her dismissal by producing stickers with her head superimposed on a different female body, legs akimbo and a hole where the crotch should be. Affixed to cars with the hole aligned to the petrol cap, they created the illusion that motorists filling their tanks were penetrating Dilma.
After her downfall, her critics waved signs that read ‘Tchau Querida’ – ‘Goodbye, Dear’. The price to Brazil certainly was. The charges against Dilma never included lining her own pockets; investigators alleged she had turned a blind eye to kickbacks at Petrobras and had disguised budget deficits. The same investigation suspected substantial bribe-taking among some of the politicians who engineered her expulsion.
Brazil’s legislature is 90 per cent male; around half of these men have themselves been indicted on corruption charges.6 One hundred per cent of the Cabinet assembled by Dilma’s white, male replacement, Michael Temer – himself accused of accepting bribes and of misuse of electoral funds – was white, a striking move in a country shaped by the diversity of its population. Brazil’s black and mixed-race nationals are in the majority, and also make up a lion’s share of the country’s poor. Temer’s Cabinet boasted another distinction: it was the first since 1979 not to include a single woman. ‘We tried to seek women but for reasons that we don’t need to bring up here, we discussed it and it was not possible,’ said Temer’s Chief of Staff, Eliseu Padilha.7 The new government quickly set about dismantling programmes designed to narrow Brazil’s overlapping wealth, race and gender gaps.
Some women manage to hold on, although holding on isn’t, of itself, a good thing. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became Africa’s first female head of state when she triumphed in Liberia’s 2005 elections, two years after the end of a bloody civil war that killed more than 250,000 people and displaced nearly a third of the country’s population. She has declared she will not contest the presidential poll planned for October 2017. ‘Our people would not take it. And my age wouldn’t allow it. So that’s out of the question,’ she said.
Her decision – provided she remains true to it – distinguishes Johnson Sirleaf from a raft of male African leaders who cling to power long after any democratic mandate ebbs. The international community has already garlanded her with praise. In 2011 Johnson Sirleaf accepted a Nobel Peace Prize along with two other women, Leymah Gbowee, a fellow Liberian, also praised for helping to heal the country’s rifts, and a Yemeni human rights activist, Tawakkul Karman. A year later, Gbowee resigned as head of Liberia’s Peace and Reconciliation Commission, attacking Johnson Sirleaf ’s efforts to tackle poverty and criticising a record of nepotism that had seen three of the President’s sons take up senior positions at, respectively, Liberia’s state oil company, its National Security Agency and its Central Bank.8
Johnson Sirleaf may not after all represent quite the model of African leadership that the wealthy democracies of Europe and North America hope to see, but at least a few of the flaws of her leadership are rooted in the continent’s history of exploitation by some of those same countries. Liberia, founded by freed slaves, free-born black Americans and Afro-Caribbean émigrés, is the only African country never to have officially been a colony. (Ethiopia was briefly annexed by Italy in 1936.) What Liberia did not escape was Western imperialism. In 1926 the US tire and rubber company Firestone leased one million Liberian acres for 99 years at the annual rate of six cents per acre, inserting a clause that gave the corporation rights over any gold, diamonds, or other minerals discovered on the land, and also tying Liberia to a loan at punitive rates.
Africa’s oldest democracy, Botswana, has been holding elections only since 1966. Africa’s newest country, South Sudan, came into being in 2011. Colonisation – the patriarchal rule of the White Master – and the struggles for liberation that speeded its end continue to make their mark. Borders drawn with no respect to tribal claims, local history or practicalities exacerbate conflicts and encourage a tendency, reinforced by those conflicts, to try to consolidate power, whether along tribal or party lines or among families. With power comes wealth. ‘Politics is the avenue to the most fantastic wealth and so of course it’s been very competitive and the men want that space,’ says Ayisha Osori, a prominent journalist, lawyer and women’s rights advocate, who stood in the 2014 primary elections for Nigeria’s House of Representatives. ‘They want to keep that space for themselves and so women have to be equally as ruthless and as determined as the men.’9
The tangles of post-imperialism play out in the country Johnson Sirleaf governs and the ways in which she governs it, but her record also illustrates the point that Osori makes and that enthusiasts for increased female representation sometimes gloss over: female