Читать книгу Attack of the 50 Ft. Women: How Gender Equality Can Save The World! - Catherine Mayer - Страница 11
ОглавлениеIN 2008, A young Labour Party activist from London travelled to Raleigh, North Carolina, to help Barack Obama win the White House. Hannah Peaker believed in descriptive representation – that it isn’t enough to elect lawmakers to advocate for us; at least some of our representatives must also share characteristics and perspectives with us if legislation is to be properly attuned to our needs. The Democratic primaries posed a quandary in this respect. Did the United States more urgently require a black President or a female one? Both firsts seemed long overdue, and the debate had quickly descended into rancour.
‘Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life,’ wrote Gloria Steinem in a piece arguing for Hillary Clinton. This sentiment from one of the most prominent leaders of second-wave feminism kicked off a self-mutilating game of Who’s More Oppressed Than Whom. After it rumbled on for nearly a month, Kimberlé Crenshaw co-authored a riposte with the author of The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler, pointing out the false polarity. ‘We believe that feminism can be expressed by a broader range of choices than this ‘either/or’ proposition entails ... For many of us, feminism is not separate from the struggle against violence, war, racism and economic injustice.’
Hannah did not believe that misogyny trounced racism or that getting any woman elected would inevitably help women. Her view was that descriptive representation creates better democracies by more closely reflecting the complexity of the voting populations. However, she had already witnessed in British left-wing politics the magical queuing system that keeps gender from ever reaching the head of the line. She had also seen women held to higher standards than men – and judged more harshly than men – because of their rarity. She wasn’t enthused by Hillary Clinton, but she didn’t think Clinton deserved the venom spat in her direction. In choosing to help Obama, Hannah hoped to support a politician who seemed as if he might, in Crenshaw and Ensler’s terms, ‘work to abolish the old paradigm of power’. Patriarchy lies at the core of that paradigm.
By the time Hannah headed to the States, Obama had defeated Clinton and teamed up with Joe Biden. They were rising in the polls against the Republican Party’s John McCain and his surprise choice as a running mate, Sarah Palin. Obama’s ground campaign looked impressive. Hannah arrived in North Carolina with just a change of clothes and an address on a piece of paper. Within 24 hours, she had digs in a house loaned to Obama’s local team by supporters, a bellyful of barbecued meat from a fundraising cookout, boxes of Obama t-shirts, hats, stickers and leaflets, and an itinerary. She would be working in Raleigh campaign headquarters but her new colleagues wanted her to meet the voters first.
‘They sent me out canvassing because they thought this whole thing was hilarious: this British girl knocking on people’s doors,’ says Hannah. ‘People just couldn’t understand what on earth I was doing there. Why had I come to campaign for their President? There’s very little travel outside of the state much less the US.’ Door-knocking in North Carolina held dangers she had never encountered on the other side of the Atlantic. After a brace of gun-toting Republicans bared their teeth and set their dogs on her, she approached the task with circumspection.
When yet another red-faced man answered the door with a shotgun in the crook of his arm and dogs circling his legs, Hannah instinctively began backing away. Still she delivered her opening line. ‘Hey, sorry to disturb you. Are you going to be voting for Obama?’
‘He’s like “What?”’
‘Are you going to be voting in this election, sir?’ Hannah mimics herself, the question starting softly and tapering to a near-whisper. ‘He’s like “You with Obama?” I’m like “Yeah”.’ She mimes cowering. ‘I was wearing an Obama jumper and baseball cap.’
She had started to calculate the time it would take to sprint from his porch to the gate when he spoke again. ‘So me and my boys, we’ve voted Republican our whole lives. But Sarah Palin is on the ticket. I said to them, “Would you want your wife to be President?” And they said “Hell no. So we’re going to be voting for Obama.”’
‘OK,’ Hannah replied, simultaneously relieved and horrified. ‘Have a badge. Welcome on board.’
This attitude wasn’t isolated. The endemic racism that smouldered and sparked throughout Obama’s two terms of office, and that Donald Trump so assiduously fans to conflagration, sometimes tried to mask itself during Obama’s initial run at the presidency, even in North Carolina, a state that between 1873 and 1957 operated 23 so-called Jim Crow laws enforcing racial segregation. On the doorsteps, people avoided talking directly about race, although they regurgitated racist conspiracy theories that Obama might be a secret Muslim or lack a US birth certificate. They made no effort to cloak their hostility towards women in politics. ‘The gender stuff you could be explicit about. You could just be anti-women,’ Hannah says.
She stayed in Raleigh until the election and watched the count in a funeral parlour hired as campaign headquarters by the Democrats ‘because it was the cheapest thing on the block. The night of the election I passed out on the floor of the embalming room with a bottle of scotch. It was the absolute best feeling in the world.’ Back in the UK, she wanted to recapture that feeling and, more than that, find a way to open up politics to women. She successfully applied for a Kennedy scholarship, and spent a year at Harvard researching the topic she had pitched: the feasibility of a women’s equality party.
Five years later, back living in London and working for the Cabinet Office after stints helping the Labour Party to get more female candidates elected, she went with friends to the Women of the World Festival at the Southbank Centre, but all the events that interested her were sold out. ‘So we drank lots of wine and had this massive discussion. “WOW is great but this has to move into the political space. How do we do that and should we act on that?” It didn’t go anywhere and a couple of weeks later someone said to me, “This party’s been set up.”’ Hannah laughs at the memory. ‘I was really cross and sulked.’
Her partner persuaded her to send an email offering to help out. She started volunteering, writing a strategy paper, and in October 2015 joined the Women’s Equality Party as Chief of Staff. ‘It was my dream job. The rest is history.’ She pauses. ‘Or not. In fact, it’s absolutely not history. It’s not even near to being history yet,’ she says. This chapter addresses a flurry of questions about women in politics – and about history. The United States rejected its first serious female candidate for the Presidency. What does this mean? Clinton had seemed poised to lead the charge of the 50-foot women. Instead history did that repeating-itself thing for which it’s renowned. Women have often made strides only to fall back. One lesson could not be more clear or more urgent: We must fight not only to extend gender equality but to retain those rights and protections we have.
The causes of her defeat bear more detailed unpicking. Clinton appeared part of the establishment, and in some ways she was. She had already occupied the White House, though never in her own right or on her own terms. Her story illustrates the limits of privilege-by-association and the sting in its tale. She earned her stripes, and some valid criticisms, during a career in politics spanning stints in the Senate and as Secretary of State, yet never escaped the accusation that she got where she did because of her husband. Her achievements were her own and so were her mistakes, but she was only ever permitted to own the latter. Her use of a private email server for government business was a bad misstep but in no way equivalent to the cascade of scandals and allegations surrounding Donald Trump.
During the Democratic primaries and in the main campaign, she accepted the mantle of the continuity candidate, the safe choice, the likely choice, enabling two white men, first Bernie Sanders, then Trump – the very definition of a fat cat – to present themselves as insurgents. This wasn’t just a tactical error on Clinton’s part. It reflected a profound misreading of the American people and of her own situation. Voters didn’t want continuity; they wanted change. She could have embodied that change. Certainly as a woman she was (excluding third-party candidates) the only real outsider in the race, for reasons already raised and explored here in greater detail.
She lost at least in part because she, and those around her, didn’t recognise the extent to which her gender was a disadvantage – 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 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 June 2010, Julia Gillard became Australia’s first and only female Prime Minister. She took over from Kevin Rudd, her Labor colleague, after he exhausted the support of the parliamentary party and as the country wrestled with the consequences of the global downturn sparked by America’s addiction to subprime mortgages and the subsequent banking crisis. In Iceland, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir was already cleaning up the wreckage left by the same storms. Neither Gillard nor Jóhanna survived long enough in office to win thanks. Gillard was ousted after three years by Rudd, who claimed he would make a better fist of steering Labor and the country. He quickly lost a general election, making way for Liberal leader Tony Abbott about whom Gillard once famously declared, ‘If he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn’t need a motion in the House of Representatives. He needs a mirror.’
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. 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. The new government quickly set about dismantling programmes designed to narrow Brazil’s overlapping wealth, race and gender gaps.
Some stories of female leadership forged in crisis end better. 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 chose not to contest the October 2017 presidential poll. ‘Our people would not take it. And my age wouldn’t allow it. So that’s out of the question,’ she said.
Her decision distinguished Johnson Sirleaf from a raft of male African leaders who cling to power long after any democratic mandate ebbs and sealed her standing as a darling of the international community. Her reputation in Liberia is not quite so immaculate. 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.
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.’
The tangles of post-imperialism play out in the country Johnson Sirleaf governed and the ways in which she governed it, but her record also illustrated the point that Osori makes and that enthusiasts for increased female representation sometimes gloss over: female leadership isn’t necessarily free from the imperfections of the male variety.
The performance in office of another Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, reinforces that lesson. She would be Myanmar’s President if the military junta that kept her under house arrest for 15 years had not also drafted a constitution that excludes her from the highest office. Instead, Suu Kyi has become the nation’s leader in all but name, holding a dual role as State Counsellor and Minister of Foreign Affairs. Until recently an icon of peaceful resistance, her lustre has dimmed with her failure to use her power to grant rights or recognition to the Rohingya, Myanmar’s marginalised Muslim population, or to curb repeated, lethal human rights abuses by the army that have driven hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in neighbouring countries. Two of Suu Kyi’s fellow Nobel Peace laureates expressed their dismay. South African Archbishop and anti-Apartheid campaigner Desmond Tutu wrote an open letter: ‘For years I had a photograph of you on my desk to remind me of the injustice and sacrifice you endured out of your love and commitment for Myanmar’s people. You symbolised righteousness . . . If the political price of your ascension to the highest office in Myanmar is your silence, the price is surely too steep.’ Malala Yousafzai, the youngest-ever Peace Prize winner, tweeted: ‘Over the last several years, I have repeatedly condemned this tragic and shameful treatment [of the Rohingya]. I am still waiting for my fellow Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to do the same.’ When 50-foot women disappoint, they do so in a big way because our expectations of them are higher.
One name always crops up in discussions about what women bring to politics: Margaret Thatcher. Love her or loathe her – and the middle ground I occupy is noticeably underpopulated – she was one of the most successful politicians of the twentieth century. She won three successive general elections and left a party that, after ejecting her as leader for fear of electoral defeat, went on to win one more. She galvanised the UK and its moribund economy, at a cost that explains the enduring anger she still evokes, levied on traditional industry and every Briton on the sharp end of the history she was making. She speeded the end of the Cold War, recognising in Mikhail Gorbachev a different kind of Soviet leader. ‘I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together,’ she said. They did.
She showcased female potential. Yet her ghost is most often summoned to demonstrate that female leaders do not invariably promote female interests. ‘I owe nothing to women’s lib,’ she insisted, and during 11 years in office she made sure that women’s lib owed little directly to her. She rejected the idea that government should help mothers to return to work, telling the BBC she did not want Britain turned into ‘a crèche society’. She appointed only one woman to any of her Cabinets. Baroness Young held a minor portfolio as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster for two years, and came to the role with a sniggering nickname that spoke to the disquiet of men in Westminster and the media at seeing women rise: ‘Old Tin Knickers’.
Young’s boss inspired a more respectful variation on this theme, but one reflecting a similar unease about female power. ‘The Iron Lady’ lived up to the soubriquet, tempered to a steely obstinacy by years of fighting her way into rooms full of patronising, posh men, and then presiding at conference tables with more of the same. An essay by academic Rosabeth Moss Kanter, published in 1977, two years before Thatcher first entered Downing Street, foreshadowed Thatcher’s leadership style. Kanter, now a professor at Harvard Business School, observed that ‘tokens’, members of minority groups in organisations, are made to feel uncomfortable about their differences and so try to conform. That might mean acting like the majority, or fitting in with the majority’s expectations of minority behaviour. Such behavioural distortions only stop when minorities reach a critical mass. Subsequent studies suggested that mass is reached at 30 per cent and above, but more recent research points to a greater complexity in the number and habits of minority behaviour.
What is clear is that token women frequently try to fit in by behaving like men – or, in Thatcher’s case, by out-manning the men. A computer analysis of Hillary Clinton’s interview and speech transcripts discovered that her language became more masculine – a parameter defined by linguistics experts – as she moved from being First Lady and up the ranks of electoral politics. This transformation may have hindered rather than helped her. Women draw criticism and questions about their competence if they show emotion – a behaviour deemed feminine – yet any women who conduct themselves in ways judged masculine are punished too. Leaked emails written by former Secretary of State Colin Powell described Clinton as ‘a friend I respect’ but then went on to list supposed defects that included ‘a long track record’ and ‘unbridled ambition’. Researchers at Yale investigating differing voter reactions to male and female candidates found that voters felt ‘moral outrage’ against women who seek power because ‘power and power-seeking are central to the way masculinity is socially constructed and communality is central to the construction of femininity, [so] intentionally seeking power is broadly seen as anti-communal and inconsistent with the societal rules for women’s behaviour.’ For many women in politics, this creates the catch-22 described by Ann Friedman in a piece about Clinton’s travails: ‘To succeed, she needs to be liked, but to be liked, she needs to temper her success.’
For Thatcher, downplaying her force of character or pretending to match any culturally generated ideals of femininity was never a serious option. Occasionally her advisers persuaded her to give interviews in which she awkwardly described a domesticity that was clearly inauthentic. She preferred to ignore her sex, but the men around her seemed unable to forget it. ‘She has the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe,’ observed French President François Mitterrand, creepily. His successor Jacques Chirac whined about Thatcher during a confrontation at a summit: ‘What more does that housewife want from me? My balls on a plate?’
Veteran Conservative MP and former Cabinet minister Ken Clarke, forgetting he was wearing a microphone ahead of a TV interview with another former Cabinet minister, Malcolm Rifkind, voiced a milder version of this sentiment in a discussion of Theresa May that he did not intend for broadcast. ‘Theresa is a bloody difficult woman,’ he said. Clarke’s thought train continued to its obvious conclusion: ‘But you and I worked for Margaret Thatcher.’ Britain’s first female Prime Minister is the model by which the second female Prime Minister, and all other female leaders, continue to be judged.
Facile though these comparisons are, female leaders, as a class, tend to resemble Thatcher in one respect. There is less show-offery. Women more often appear to thrive on the exercise of power than the attendant publicity. Think how Angela Merkel compares to Nicolas Sarkozy and Silvio Berlusconi, or Theresa May to her one-time, and quite possibly future, leadership rival Boris Johnson, or Hillary to Bill or Donald. Thatcher never sought press coverage for its own sake.
There is a commonality between Thatcher and Merkel that is also worthy of mention: a background in science. When Thatcher entered politics, she forged a new path. The elite of society imbued their sons with the expectation of leadership, and trades unions provided an alternative training ground for political talent. Family ties delivered the world’s first female Prime Minister, Sri Lanka’s Sirimavo Bandaranaike, to power and installed the world’s longest-serving female leader, India’s Indira Gandhi, in office. Political dynasties produced Aung San Suu Kyi, Sheikh Hasina, her predecessor Khaleda Zia, Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto, Indonesia’s Megawati Sukarnoputri, Argentinian Presidents Isabel Martínez de Perón and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Cory Aquino of the Philippines, and South Korea’s Park Geun-hye. Thatcher had no such advantages. She studied chemistry and went on to work in the field at the food manufacturer Lyons (where, legend has it, she helped to invent soft-scoop ice cream).
Angela Merkel found a calm berth in East Germany as a researcher in physical chemistry. These parallels are noteworthy because the duo also gained a reputation for the kind of evidence-based decision-making more routinely associated with laboratories than parliaments. Even so, Thatcher and Merkel will be remembered for big, bold projects rooted in ideology and emotion rather than cold calculation. Thatcherism held, at its core, an instinctive and visceral moral certitude that branded opposing ideologies as not just wrong but malign. Merkel’s pivot from cautious consensus-builder to passionate advocate of European engagement in solving the refugee crisis drew deep on her own experience. She too had been the wrong side of the barbed wire.
Germany’s 2005 elections ended in deadlock. Neither Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democrats nor Gerhard Schröder’s left-leaning Social Democrats, could muster a workable majority. Merkel consulted, forged alliances, held her nerve until Schröder withdrew, leaving her to head a grand coalition. She was not only the first woman to occupy the Chancellery, but the first leader of reunited Germany raised behind the Iron Curtain. As TIME scrambled late at night to produce a cover story, international editor Michael Elliott composed a headline that almost went to print before we noticed its double meaning: ‘Not Many Like Her’.
There still aren’t many – if any – like her, and even after she won a fourth term you’d be forgiven for assuming that not many of her colleagues or compatriots like her either. Although her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Baviarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) remained the largest bloc, their combined vote share shrank significantly. The Social Democratic Party fared even worse, recording its lowest result of the postwar era. The BBC website trumpeted this outcome as a ‘disaster for Merkel’ while commentators queued up to blame her for the rise of the hard-right Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD), which broke through to become the third largest party nationally. Merkel was indeed culpable – in the same sense that Barack Obama is responsible for Donald Trump: progressive politics sometimes generate backlash. The AfD had originally started as a protest party campaigning against German commitments to bail out floundering Eurozone countries, but found fresh purpose on 4 September 2015, when Merkel responded to the press of refugees from Syria stranded in Hungary by opening the border and issuing a welcome. ‘Wir schaffen das’, she said: we will manage. At first most Germans agreed, but after more than a million refugees and migrants sought to make new lives in Germany, that consensus melted.
If there was a defining moment, it was the mass assaults on women in Cologne during the final hours of 2015. There is still little clarity about the nature of these attacks: to what extent they were planned and whether most perpetrators were, as initially reported, foreigners. The authorities have admitted they do not expect to identify the majority of those responsible. If they did, it would at least now be easier to bring them to justice. Until 2016, Germany’s antiquated laws on sexual assault put the burden on women to show they had physically resisted their attackers. These laws were finally revised and strengthened, also gaining a clause that classifies groping as a sex crime.
That did nothing to stop a narrative about Merkel gaining traction inside the country and out: she was a busted flush. Germany’s first female Chancellor had broken Germany and, far from helping German womenfolk, had exposed them to danger.
Pretty much everything about that narrative was wrong, although Merkel did make one key miscalculation. Until the refugee crisis, the criticism routinely levelled against her was that she used her power too sparingly – that she had responded too slowly to the Eurozone crisis and with too much focus on German national interests at the expense of poorer countries such as Greece. She put a different gloss on her approach: she preferred to govern in ‘many small steps’, rather than big ones. This fitted with the legacy of her early life, in a police state where she learned to achieve without attracting attention. It was also pragmatic: the German voting system creates coalitions rather than outright majorities, and deploys multiple checks and balances. German history warns against unfettered power. Even so, Merkel confronted the migrant crisis as Europe’s strongest leader, the only one with political capital. In finally spending that capital, she sought to instill in other European leaders a sense of collective responsibility. This was, as she saw it, ‘a historic test of globalisation’.
Merkel alone rose to it. She had overestimated Europe’s capacity for solidarity. Her remarks at a press conference after her party’s poor showing in the September 2016 Berlin state elections, widely misreported as a mea culpa, instead restated her convictions. She did regret the phrase ‘we will manage’, which ‘makes many people feel provoked, though I meant it to be inspiring’.
However, she had followed a humanitarian imperative and a strategy that, despite flaws, bore fruit. Her integration strategy ensured the migrants got German language lessons and fast-tracked work permits, enabling the country to start filling 1.1 million jobs left vacant by an ageing population. These successes, and the falling numbers of migrant arrivals, did nothing to quiet her critics, especially within the ranks of the CDU and CSU. They had never really accepted her; now, they treated her as a liability. Days after the 2017 election, Alexander Mitsch, the leader of a new rightwing grouping within the CDU/CSU, called for Merkel’s resignation. ‘It’s important for there to be new momentum,’ he said. When Merkel’s efforts to form a coalition with two smaller parties foundered, she again got the blame, even though one of the smaller parties walked away. ‘Merkel has no power and no authority,’ opined Die Welt. Yet her international popularity remains largely intact. Women across the world chuckled when Donald Trump refused to shake her hand at their first White House meeting and celebrated her return to power. Ayesha Hazarika, a former Labour party adviser and stand-up comedian, spoke for many when she praised Merkel to a BBC audience: ‘In a world full of demented men like Kim Jong-un, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin – these crazy man-babies – I’m very glad that Angela Merkel is there. In terms of global leadership, she is a moral authority in a very scary world right now.’
Hazarika was by no means the only left-leaning woman happy to see Merkel back in Chancellery and to hope she finds a way to survive there. Yet in many parts of the world, female voters are more likely than men to vote for left-of-centre parties. This pattern is true in the US, where the majority of white women who voted for Trump was not as large as the majority of white men who backed him. You can see why that might be. Conservatism is inherently disposed towards maintaining the status quo, and some groups of female voters know this is not to their benefit, not least because of the right’s fondness for downsizing the state at the potential costs of state-sector jobs that employ women and services that support women, plus a tolerance for a wide income spread in a system that relegates more women to the lower tiers. Merkel has persuaded female voters in Germany to buck this trend by appealing across party lines to Social Democrats – and to women. At the 2013 election, 44 per cent of all female voters backed Merkel’s party, compared to 24 per cent for the Social Democrats. In 2017, she lost a chunk of that support but retained some residual goodwill by showing what women can be in a country that until relatively recently in its dominant Western states envisaged only three spheres of female activity: Kinder, Küche, Kirche – children, kitchen, church. Up until 1958, a West German husband could demand his wife’s employer sack her if she neglected the housework. These attitudes were still reflected in the education system Merkel inherited, in which a majority of schools in the west ended at midday so pupils could return home for a cooked lunch. When Merkel first led the Christian Democrats into an election, opponents and colleagues alike asked ‘Kann die das?’ Is she able to do this? ‘With a negative touch,’ says Ursula von der Leyen, Germany’s first female Defence Minister. ‘Nobody is asking any more.’
This does not mean Merkel’s record on promoting gender equality has been perfect. Like many female leaders, her instinct is to shy away from gender politics. She was uncomfortable with her first portfolio in Helmut Kohl’s government, as Minister of Women and Youth. Germany’s sluggish birth rate rather than any feminist impulse prompted Merkel to introduce a wide range of measures to support working mothers, including the provision of parental leave paid up to 65 per cent of salaries for up to 14 months, guaranteed daycare for children aged one or above, and an expansion of all-day schools. She only reluctantly gave in to deploying quotas to increase female representation on the boards of large German companies. ‘It is pathetic that in more than 65 years of the Federal Republic of Germany, it was not possible for the Dax-30 companies to get a few more women on supervisory boards on a voluntary basis,’ she said. ‘But at some point there had been so many hollow promises that it was clear – this isn’t working.’
German society has witnessed significant changes. Female participation in the German labour force rose by two percentage points in the decade ahead of Merkel’s first electoral victory and by eight points during her first ten years in government. It would be unwise to claim a direct correlation; many factors will have played a part. Nevertheless, there’s no denying that German women have risen under Germany’s first female leader.
Theresa May’s elevation prompted crowing in Tory ranks. The Conservatives had notched up a second female Prime Minister before Labour even managed a female party leader. May, Merkel and two other female leaders in Europe, Norway’s Erna Solberg and Serbia’s Ana Brnabić are on the right. Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović belonged to the conservative Croatian Democratic Union party before her election as Croatia’s President. This does not mean rightwing politics promotes better outcomes for women, rather that parties of the left are especially bad at promoting women.
The paradoxical explanation for this phenomenon is that parties of the left have historically championed gender equality. This means they are often too convinced of their own virtue to recognise their failings. Those failings loosely group into two categories. The first is one of precedence. In their desire to solve all structural inequalities, these parties get caught up in unhelpful binaries of the kind that disfigured the Democratic primaries in 2008 – ethnic minorities or women, class or gender, pensioners or underprivileged youth – reflexively assigning the lowest priority to women even though most forms of disadvantage intersect with being female. Far-left activists aim not to fix parts of the system, but to change the whole system, again stranding women in an endless waiting game. They also mistake optics for action. Amnesty International’s 2015 report on Bolivia noted that the socialist government had set up a Gender Office and Unit for Depatriarchalisation and created a Deputy Minister for Equal Opportunities within the Ministry of Justice and Fundamental Rights, responsible for the advancement of women. However, none of these new institutions had been allocated the resources necessary to be effective. The Equal Opportunities brief, for example, received just 5.3 per cent of the ministerial budget. As the White Queen tells Alice, ‘The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today.’
