Attack of the 50 Ft. Women: How Gender Equality Can Save The World!. Catherine Mayer
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– and because many white female voters did not recognise the extent to which any privilege they enjoyed was circumscribed in the same ways. The result, the Trump presidency, is bad news for women everywhere. On his first full day in office, he signed an executive order blocking US funds to any organisation providing abortion advice or care overseas. What we cannot know is whether a Hillary Clinton presidency would have benefited women, other than by stopping Trump.
We cannot know, but we can draw conclusions, about Clinton and more widely about the impact of women in politics. The Women’s Equality Party argues that increasing the overall participation of women is necessary if women are to advance and to hold on to that progress. WE also maintain that such a change wouldn’t benefit only women, but everyone, by improving politics and the outcomes of the political system. What evidence underpins these arguments? If given a chance to head governments and fill half the seats in parliaments, might women run things not just differently but better? Does the answer depend on the individual women concerned, in the ways Crenshaw and Ensler highlighted in their reply to Steinem, or might this also be a numbers game, as Hannah’s vision of descriptive representation implies?
The next chapter tackles a huge question underlying this debate – whether what women are and how we behave is biologically hard-wired. First we’ll look at some of the Titans and at the rare examples of gender-balanced legislatures to make an assessment about the ways in which women are already shaping the future.
Let’s start with a reality check. When Theresa May took over from David Cameron, Money magazine got a little overexcited. ‘Even with all 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.’
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. Several have departed since then, including Liberia’s Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Chile’s Michelle Bachelet and Poland’s Beata Szydło. The remaining tally of 15 leading women – just 15 – in the world’s 144 full or partial democracies, includes Angela Markel, who in September 2017 secured a shaky fourth term as German chancellor but struggled to form a government. The snap election in Iceland failed to produce a clear outcome but did add a new passenger to the minibus. Katrín Jakobsdóttir, leader of the Left-Greens, heads an unexpected coalition with parties of the right. Few Icelandic feminists are cheering. The contest saw those right-wing parties – and men – do better than expected, with the percentage of women in Parliament shrinking.
Several of the existing minibus passengers have less than a firm grip on power. They face internal rebellions, angry voters or anyway hold rubber-stamping roles or rely on male patronage for their positions. But even if we ignore such distinctions and inflate the ranks of female leaders by including the estimable Nicola Sturgeon, who heads Scotland’s devolved government, female leaders remain 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 7.6 per cent of all world leaders, 8.1 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 and in 2017 revised upwards its prediction of the number of years needed to achieve gender parity, from 170 to 217 years. Things really are going backwards. However the health and survival category illustrates how incomplete a picture such rankings give, 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.
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 compared to the Taoiseach – prime minister – and legislative bodies, 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. This year, voters will get the opportunity to weigh the issue again, in a referendum announced in September 2017 by new Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar.
From a distance Varadkar appears to represent a fresh face of Ireland and in significant ways he does, as the Republic’s youngest, first openly gay premier and its first of colour (his father, Ashok Varadkar, is Indian-born and like his son, a doctor). However, although his work as a GP exposed the younger Varadkar to the cruelties of Ireland’s abortion ban and, he says, moderated his views to see the current law as ‘too restrictive’, he still will seek to prevent full reproductive rights for women. ‘I consider myself pro-life, as I accept that the unborn is a human life with rights . . . I do not support abortion on request or on demand,’ he has said.
Like Varadkar, 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 a female President and two female Prime Ministers. Erna Solberg, Norway’s current Prime Minister, is the nation’s