Female Leadership: An Anti-Pandemic Success
As the coronavirus pandemic creates chaos across the globe, changing the everyday life for so many people, there have been huge differences in the way governments have chosen to respond to the biggest global emergency of the past years. As the months went on, and cases increased, several countries appeared ahead of the pack in responding to the virus. Countries such as Germany, Taiwan, New Zealand, Iceland, Finland, Norway and Denmark had two things in common in their handling of the crisis: they all contained the virus successfully and promptly, and they are all led by women.
While the virus is still very much an ongoing crisis, and it will likely take years to understand the success of different countries’ responses truly, this correlation between female leaders and effective virus responses is hard to ignore.
In a New York Times article published in mid-June, Nicholas Kristof looked at coronavirus death rates from 21 countries, finding that while male-led countries suffered an average of 214 deaths per million, when it came to female-led countries this figure fell to 36 per million. Are women simply better at dealing with crises? Would these countries have been equally successful with male leaders? Is it time to finally reconsider our inherent associations between masculine qualities and leadership?
Women have often been taught that to reach leadership roles they must emulate traditionally masculine qualities like stoicism, aggression, independence, dominance. But it is clear from many of these countries’ success regarding coronavirus that their leaders have succeeded, not in spite of their feminine qualities, but because of them.
New Zealand’s Jacinta Ardern has gained international attention for her response to the virus. With her kindness-first approach, based on empathy and shared responsibility, helped foster trust amongst her citizens in abiding by the rules of the strict lockdown to keep their neighbours safe. As opposed to the unemotional stoicism we often associate with strong leaders, Ardern directly addressed the nation through intimate Facebook Live videos, empathising with their fears rather than demanding obedience. While New Zealand is a small, sparsely populated island nation, this empathetic leadership also helped the EU’s most populous country to keep death rates much lower than its neighbours.
Germany, led by their ‘Mutti’ of the past 15 years, Angela Merkel, successfully introduced measures to address the pandemic early and avoided the death rates seen in other European countries. Like Ardern, Merkel avoided political spin or indulgent rhetoric, choosing instead to communicate with her citizens calmly and clearly, directly addressing people’s fears and anxieties and being realistic about the necessary measures required to combat the crisis.
Early on in the pandemic, a speech by the Prime Minister of Sint Maarten, Silveria Jacobs, trended worldwide due to its firm and effective language in response to the pandemic. Jacobs firmly instructed her citizens to ‘simply stop moving’, a method of delivery appears to have worked, as the country has had only 15 coronavirus deaths in a population of over 41,000.
During times of emergency, when a collective effort from every citizen is required, effective communication based on empathy and understanding appears to hold the key to success. Perhaps the question we are asking should not be why women have been so successful at handling the coronavirus pandemic, but rather why men have been so unsuccessful?
Of the five Nordic states, Sweden is the only one led by a male Prime Minister - a country which now has the 5th highest death rate in Europe, nearly six times that of their neighbours Norway and Finland. While many female leaders have found that warmth and compassion, coupled with realism and transparency, have led to successful containment of the virus; many male-led countries have not reached this epiphany.
In recent years, several ‘strongman’ leaders have been elected across the world on platforms of individualism and exceptionalism, critical of experts and anything perceived as political dissent. Are these leaders - Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orbán - who are leading some of the least successful responses to the pandemic and have seen some of the highest death rates in the world.
While women have often been conditioned to be overly cautious and self-critical, the fact that men are encouraged to take risks and be assertive may not always serve them well as leaders. In an article in the Harvard Business Review focusing on effective leadership, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Cindy Gallop state that rapidly rising through the ranks does not necessarily equate to success once you arrive at the top. They highlight the fact that, while women often face too many obstacles when accessing leadership roles, there are also ‘too few obstacles for incompetent males’.
An awareness of one’s own limitations is very different from a lack of self-belief, and an ability to defer to others for assistance and advice can often be incredibly useful, particularly in an unprecedented emergency which requires full cooperation between medical experts and politicians. In Sweden and Britain, two male-led countries with hugely flawed coronavirus responses compared to their neighbours, leaders relied on lockdown advice and modelling which came mostly from within their party, with little room for input from outside sources.
The coronavirus pandemic, whilst causing incredible instability and tragedy across the world, has been a powerful yardstick for measuring what it truly takes to be a good leader. Not only can we encourage women to reach for leadership roles, but also to exploit their inherent qualities rather than attempting to emulate men in similar positions. Perhaps the world does not need more Iron Ladies, who smash the glass ceiling only for the shards to fall back down onto their most vulnerable citizens.
The coronavirus pandemic exposes us to a physical threat to our health and wellbeing, but it also reveals the gaping inequalities which had been present in our societies for too long. As many people yearn to return to normal, it is clear that we need to reevaluate what we viewed as normal for so many years. We can learn a lot from these female leaders and their responses to the pandemic, and the value of qualities such as warmth, empathy and humility. As we have space to reassess what we want the new normal to be, perhaps we can get rid of the idea that kindness and leadership are incompatible.
Written by Ellen McVeigh
Ellen is a recent graduate in English & History from Belfast, about to start an MA in September.