Message to U.S. voters reluctant to vote for a woman for president: Around the world, women are standing out among the leaders fighting coronavirus most effectively.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, and Iceland Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir are among the world’s few women leading nations—and they’re among some of the most successful in the current crisis.
Under Merkel, Germany has had Europe’s biggest testing program and a notably low rate of COVID-19 deaths. In Taiwan, “early, aggressive intervention measures have limited the outbreak to just 393 confirmed infections and six deaths.” Iceland is doing widespread testing that is not only helping the island nation control the spread of the virus but is giving the rest of the world important information about the prevalence of asymptomatic cases. In New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern “looked at what had worked in China, in South Korea, and elsewhere—and what had definitely not worked in the U.S. and U.K.—in laying out a program based on tough, coordinated federal action, sound science, and a dedicated program of testing and isolation that’s not designed to ‘flatten the curve.’ It’s designed to completely eliminate COVID-19 in New Zealand.”
Meanwhile, United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson kept on shaking hands with hospital patients right up until he was on track to be a hospital patient himself, and Donald Trump … is Donald Trump.
Let’s be clear about what this says. ”Being a woman doesn’t automatically make you better at handling a global pandemic. Nor does it automatically make you a better leader; suggesting it does reinforces sexist and unhelpful ideas that women are innately more compassionate and cooperative,” Arwa Mahdawi wrote at The Guardian. “What is true, however, is that women generally have to be better in order to become leaders; we are held to far higher standards than men. Women are rarely able to fail up in the way men can; you have to be twice as good as a man in order to be taken half as seriously.”
Too bad about those U.S. voters—and that Electoral College.