When Julia Gillard became Australia’s first female prime minister on Thursday, she took her place beside 18 other elected women leaders worldwide.
Though you may not have noticed it, we’re enjoying an all-time high in the number of female prime ministers and presidents. Trinidad and Tobago got a female prime minister this month and Slovakia and Finland are likely to follow.
Does this make any difference to women? Does a female leader ensure more female-friendly policies?
Nan Sloane, director of the Centre for Women and Democracy, says it depends on the individual.
“Michelle Bachelet [the former president of Chile] came at the job with a very definite view that she was doing this as a woman, compared with somebody like Margaret Thatcher, who made quite a different choice as to how she operated,” she says.
In Iceland, which has a female — and, crucially, feminist — prime minister in Johanna Sigurdardottir, the appointment has had a clear effect on policy. Strip clubs have been banned and men who pay for sex have been criminalized.
Sarah Childs, professor of gender and politics at Bristol University in England, says, “You can’t prove that x number of women in a parliament will change things, but in the UK, there is evidence that the influx of Labour women were at the forefront of women’s issues and perspectives on the political agenda.”
She points to policies such as Sure Start to help new families and laws on domestic violence. And the influence that women can have on policy is obviously greater if they’re at the very top.
“A good example is the first PMQs [prime minister’s questions in the House of Commons] with [PM] David Cameron and [the acting Labour leader] Harriet Harman,” she says, “where she questioned proposed policies on issues she cares about — in this case the anonymity of rape defendants. She put it on the agenda. Clearly it is important that women are in leadership positions.”
The other effect of having women in leadership roles is to encourage them to believe they can succeed in parliament — the former Labour MP Dawn Butler once said that while she despised the politics of Thatcher (a woman who never promoted another woman from the House of Commons to Cabinet), just the fact of her being prime minister while Butler was growing up inspired the younger woman to become a politician.
Ceri Goddard, director of the Fawcett Society, the British campaign group for gender equality, says, “There can be no doubt that having women at senior levels in politics attracts other women, and also changes the overall political culture.”
“Evidence suggests you need a critical mass of women in leadership positions to make a big difference — 30 percent is acknowledged as the minimum, but we’d be arguing for 50/50,” she says.
When it comes to world politics, even if we’re experiencing a heyday of female leadership, we’re still a long way from parity with men: Women make up 9 percent of world leaders.
And, unfortunately, it might be too much to wish for that Diane Abbott, who is running for the Labour party leadership, will become the UK’s next prime minister.
So where should we be looking for the next female leader on the international scene?
Sloane says it’s hard to say: “[Women leaders] tend to arrive slightly unlooked-for. I think if you had said three months ago that Kevin Rudd [the former Australian prime minister] was going to resign, it would have seemed unlikely. They are not necessarily the countries that you would predict.”
“A quite significant number of women leaders are from conservative or right-wing parties, and some from very traditional societies,” she said. “There just isn’t a pattern.”
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000
North Korea has detained another official over last week’s failed launch of a warship, which damaged the naval destroyer, state media reported yesterday. Pyongyang announced “a serious accident” at Wednesday last week’s launch ceremony, which crushed sections of the bottom of the new destroyer. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the mishap a “criminal act caused by absolute carelessness.” Ri Hyong-son, vice department director of the Munitions Industry Department of the Party Central Committee, was summoned and detained on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He was “greatly responsible for the occurrence of the serious accident,” it said. Ri is the fourth person