NEW ZEALAND PM GIVES BIRTH

AUCKLAND: New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has become only the second leader to give birth while in office, in another milestone for women in politics. The 37-year- old took to Instagram to reveal the birth of her daughter Thursday, but has downplayed the significance of her pregnancy. “Plenty of women have multitasked before me, and I want to acknowledge that,” she said in January. New Zealand has a track record of being progressive on women’s issues— in 1893 it became the first country to give women the right to vote. Australia extended the franchise in 1902. Major powers of the era followed later, with the United States granting women the vote nationally in 1920. Women in Britain had to wait until 1928. Women in Saudi Arabia voted for the first time in 2015 at municipal elections. Jeannette Rankin, a Republican from Montana and leading activist, was the first woman to be elected to the US Congress, in 1916. Despite being ahead of the curve with universal suffrage, New Zealand didn’t get its first female MP until 1933, while Australia elected two women lawmakers to its national parliament in 1943. The first woman elected to Britain’s House of Commons was Constance Markievicz in 1918, although as a member of the Irish Republican party Sinn Fein, she did not take her seat. The first female prime minister was Sirima Bandaranaike, who was elected to lead Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1960. She only came into politics after the assassination of her husband, then-premier Solomon Bandaranaike, but became a dominant figure, serving three terms as head of government. Since then, several women have occupied the biggest job in their respective countries, including Margaret Thatcher of Britain, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, India’s Indira Gandhi, Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff and Thailand’s Yingluck Shinawatra. But yet again, New Zealand is a trailblazer in this respect—Ardern is the third woman to be the country’s prime minister, following in the footsteps of Helen Clark and Jenny Shipley.