Women as Political Leaders

Studies in Gender and Governing

Michael A. Genovese, Janie S. Steckenrider, Michael A. Genovese, Janie S. Steckenrider

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136335846
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

Over the past several years, the fields of Leadership Studies and of Women's Studies have grown tremendously. This book, which is a series of case studies of women who have headed governments across the globe, will discuss the conditions and situations under which women rose to power and give a brief biography of each woman. A special chapter on why no U.S. woman has risen to the top, and a review of the political campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Michele Bachmann and others will be included. This book will be of interest for courses in women and leadership, global politics and gender studies.

1

Introduction

Women as Political Leaders: Does Gender Matter?

Michael A. Genovese

Her wings are clipped and it is found deplorable she does not fly.

Simone de Beauvoir

The study of political leadership has made great strides in recent years. A variety of “maxims” have emerged that materially advance our understanding of leadership in society. Among these maxims:

leadership is largely contextual

leadership is different than power

leadership requires followers

leadership emerges in all organized groups

leadership can be learned (though not always mastered)

good judgment is the key to good leadership

leadership is aspirational and goal oriented (usually group goals)

Armed with these maxims, scholars can begin the pre-theoretical theorybuilding efforts that will more fully lead us to understanding and prediction in the complex world of politics and leadership studies.

An area where we are especially lacking in accepted maxims is the study of gender and leadership. One reason is that until recent years, very few women headed governments. Today, no such “small N” problem exists. Dozens of women have headed governments across the globe, and it is now time to search for verifiable generalizations, or maxims, about gender and leadership that can advance theory building.

Leadership refers to more than mere office holding. It is a complex phenomenon revolving around influence —the ability to move others in de-sired directions. Successful leaders are those who can take full advantage of their opportunities and their skills. Institutional structures, the immediate situation, the season of power, the political culture, regime type, the dynamics of followership, and partisan factors define the opportunities for the exercise of leadership. The leader's style, political acumen, character traits, and personal attributes provide a behavioral repertoire, a set of skills. Opportunities and skill interact to determine the success or failure of attempts to lead and influence.

WOMEN IN POLITICS

To begin, comparatively few women rise to a position of political leadership; it is perhaps the last political taboo. In a cross-cultural comparison of political leaders, Jean Blondel (1987) concludes that leaders “are overwhelmingly male” (p. 25). In Blondel's study of world leaders, less than .005% of all leaders were women (pp. 116–117). As Linda K. Richter (1990–1991) writes, “Male dominance has been legitimized in law and custom. Politics or the public life of the polity has been presumed to be a natural sphere for men while for women, to the extent they had a space or turf to call their own, the ‘natural’ sphere was presumed to be private” (p. 525).

In recent years, this has begun to change (Dolan, Deckman, & Swers, 2010). Scholars cite three factors that lead to underrepresentation of women in public office: political socialization, situation/structural factors, and active discrimination against women (Hedblom, 1987, pp. 14–15). These, and perhaps other factors, have kept women at the margins of political power (Han, 2007, chap. 1).

WOMEN AS LEADERS

The above notwithstanding, some women have risen to become the chief executives of their countries in the post—World War II era. The number of such cases and the fact that they have occurred in diverse systems and societies under varying political conditions lead, we believe, to two conclusions. The first is that despite the persistence of barriers at individual and national levels, women will continue to emerge as chief executives in a growing number of countries and types of systems. That political fact leads to the second conclusion: that the rise of women to positions of power, their performance in office, and their impact on their societies is ripe for scholarly analysis and deserves careful attention from political scientists.

The study of women in leadership positions, particularly at the highest levels of decision making in a society, promises to contribute to our understanding of both gender as a politically defined and politically relevant variable and the politics of the dynamics of leadership. The potential for contributions to multiple realms of inquiry is typical of the general fields of gender studies and women and politics (Sapiro, 1983).

When the person who achieves a top leadership role is female, the political and personal biography both allow and force attention to the interplay of perceptions, expectations, interpretations of life experiences, and myths that make up the social definition of reality and “appropriate” gender roles (Baxter & Lansing, 1983; Conway, Bourke, & Scott, 1989). The lives and careers of women who have headed nations offer a unique vantage point on the role of gender in political life. The prevalence of gender distinctions becomes clearer as one recounts the challenges and opportunities that leaders have faced in their climb to the top. The depth and tenacity of gender stereotypes become clear when they continue to affect individuals even after they have achieved the ultimate political position.

The ascent of any person to power within society is, almost by definition, a rare and extraordinary event. The political leader's biography and career can help identify and highlight key features of a political system. Further, when a leader is sharply different in an important and obvious way from her predecessors, it allows an instructive test of propositions about the enduring features of a particular political system and about the necessary conditions for leadership in general. The emergence of a woman head of government may be both effect and cause of social change and fundamental shifts in the distribution of political power between men and women (Ford, 2010, chap. 1).

A focus on the impact of a person's gender on a political career can also help clarify and refine the potential contribution of gender to understanding political behavior within a system. The story of a woman's rise to power traces her encounters with the obstacles, restrictions, and deterrents that face any ambitious person in her society as well as the resources that may be available and skills that may be acquired to circumvent them. But her life will also illuminate the distinctive barriers faced because of marginality (Githens & Prestage, 1977, pp. 6–7) and perhaps her skill at developing gender-specific resources or strategies to overcome them (LeVeness & Sweeney, 1987). Every political system limits opportunity and access to elite roles by tacitly or overtly erecting a set of initial hurdles based on background or demographic traits. The careers of successful women can illustrate the extent to which gender itself, directly or indirectly, is a limiting condition in a particular society. To the extent that these ascriptive traits serve a gatekeeper function and discriminate against everyone who shares them, they are gender neutral. Any aspirant for a leadership position must develop a strategy to overcome them. And some of the preconditions for political success in a system are relatively gender neutral. There are, for example, class, ethnic, religious, and regional biases operative in many societies that restrict access to political power and careers.

Some of the preconditions for success in a system may appear applicable to aspirants, but have differential effects on men and women. For example, in the United States voters show a clear preference for candidates with presentable spouses and one or more children. This is a consideration for both male and female candidates, and thus can be seen as a systematic factor. At the same time, given the still-prevailing expectation that women have the major responsibility for child rearing and family maintenance, the bias in favor of “good family people” as candidates imposes an additional, gender-based constraint on the politically ambitious woman (Carroll & Fox, 2009).

Those aspects of a society that discriminate directly on the bias of gender are often thrown into clear relief by the experiences of those women who face them. The most obvious cases involve overtly sexist attitudes that disparage women as public officials, leaders, or decision makers. Other social institutions have similar effects.

If the implicit rule in a culture is that politics is “really” a man's world, or the experience of other ambitious women suggests that there is a glass ceiling allowing a woman to rise so far but no further, any woman who aspires to the top is subversive of the established order. The woman who does reach the top must have found a way around or over the exclusionary bias and thus potentially undermines it.

The impact of the successful woman's career on beliefs and expectations about gender will vary directly with the extent to which it resembles that of her male predecessors in power. If a woman is already at or near the top of the elite as she begins her political career because she inherited her position and status from her parental family, or because she has acquired it through close association with her husband, then observers with a conscious or unconscious interest in preserving gender bias in the political system may discount her as merely an anomaly unlikely to be repeated or attribute her success to family or spouse rather than her own skills and efforts. But the more closely the woman leader's career resembles those of her male colleagues, the more difficult it is for observers to avoid interpretations that challenge exclusionary assumptions.

The career of a woman who becomes a head of government will thus be affected by and have an effect upon her contemporaries' expectations and stereotypes. A politically ambitious woman cannot escape the consequences of social beliefs that gender differences are politically relevant. She must come to some understanding of herself as a person and as a political figure that resolves, manages, or represses the tensions between her emerg-ing self-view as capable of functioning effectively at the highest political levels and the generalized social view that neither she nor any other woman has that competence. Regardless of how she handles the internal impact of gender roles, she must also develop strategies for dealing with them as a strategic aspect of her career, because others may react to her in terms of gender. At times that will mean overcoming or circumventing restrictions. If one hallmark of the ultimately successful political leader is the ability to transform apparent liabilities into assets, then we might expect to see her manipulate traditional stereotypes of women to outflank or disarm opponents.

We must remember that successful women political leaders are not a recent phenomenon. Throughout history, even when women in general have been excluded from political power, some individuals have exercised great influence. Several queens are central figures in the histories of their countries, there have been a handful of extraordinary women warriors (Fraser, 1988), and there have been consorts who wielded immense power through their relationships to kings or emperors. But those women experienced success by using well the opportunities and resources offered by socially defined and sanctioned gender roles, or could be defined by contemporaries as unique individuals in extraordinary times.

In contrast, the careers of those women who have occupied the highest positions in their respective political systems in the 20th and 21st centuries, with few exceptions, represent a distinctive phenomenon: Their achievement of power challenges existing definitions of gender roles. This has enhanced their political visibility and, arguably, salience to students of politics (Henderson & Jeydel, 2009).

Elizabeth I, for instance, was an important and influential figure in British history because she capitalized on the resources inherent in her position and her considerable political skills as she presided over a profound transformation of Britain's world role and domestic economy. But her presence on the throne was fully consonant with traditional British values and assumptions and did not represent an extraordinary or even particularly unusual event. She came to power in the usual way, fully in keeping with both the explicit and the tacit rules of the game. Her success did not call any basic social assumptions into question.

Margaret Thatcher's residence at 10 Downing Street, on the other hand, makes her an extraordinary figure. During the rule and reign of Elizabeth I, access to the apex of the system, the throne, was a function of birth order; chromosomes and socially defined roles were irrelevant. By the reign of Elizabeth II, access to the apex of the system had long since become the ultimate prize in a much more open and cutthroat political competition. But that competition had been explicitly restricted to males, and at the highest levels was still tacitly exclusive. Margaret Thatcher did not come to power in quite the usual way, and her success necessarily has implications for the future of some salient aspects of the British political system.

UNDERSTANDING GENDER AND LEADERSHIP

Developing an understanding of how social definitions of gender affect a political career will ultimately lead to two sets of conclusions: one concerning the barriers impeding politically ambitious women, the other concerning the strategies some women use to neutralize these barriers (Wolbrecht, Beckwith, & Baldez, 2008; Lawless & Fox, 2010).

Trying to disentangle systematic, situational, and personal variables in explaining the behavior of any political actor is a daunting task, and it is even more so when the actor occupies one of the central positions in a system. A simplistic model that casts gender as the independent variable and a particular decision-making style or issue position as the dependent variable is not likely to be very useful (Kelly & Burgess, 1989). However, gender can be expected to have a significant impact on performance in two ways.

Gender will have an effect on the leader's performance in office to the extent that others, allies and adversaries, perceive it...