Study: 99 years before number of female, male leaders is equal

I wanted to list female political leaders to watch in 2018, in honor of Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day, but the list is sadly disappointing.

Currently, there are only 20 women holding the office of heads of state, which equals 6.3 percent of the 315 international leaders. And two of the heads of state are hereditary queens.

The World Economic Forum’s 2017 Gender Gap report predicts that it will take 99 years to, maybe, reach political parity between male and female leaders.

Several female prime ministers lost elections during the last decade. Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff was impeached for budget malfeasance, South Korea’s President Park Geun-Hye was impeached for corruption in 2016 and awaits trial, and Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra was defeated in 2015 and found guilty of abusing power by the country’s constitutional court. It’s unclear whether these leaders would have fared better if they were male.

In one happy contrast, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the world’s first elected black female president and Africa’s first elected female head of state (in 2006), survived some dips to step down with dignity in 2018.

Of those female leaders now in power, Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi has been the biggest disappointment. A heroic fighter for democracy and human rights, she suffered 15 years of house arrest and won the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize. But she has refused to criticize Myanmar’s military for its brutalization of 500,000 members of the ethnic Muslim Rohingya minority.

So who, among the remaining 18 non-queenly female leaders, should you watch in 2018?

• First and foremost is the indomitable Angela Merkel, German chancellor since 2005. In her final term, her power has dipped and her party’s parliamentary bloc shrunk, but Merkel is still an anchor for Europe, which the continent badly needs.

• Theresa May, the weakened prime minister of the United Kingdom. The U.K.’s drawn-out Brexit is further destabilizing Europe. This year will reveal whether May can negotiate a divorce from the European Union without crashing her island’s economy and sparking new strife in Northern Ireland.

• The two female Baltic presidents, Kersti Kaljulaid of Estonia and the re-elected Dalia Grybauskaite of Lithuania. It takes particular skill to manage Baltic affairs with Vladimir Putin’s Russia breathing down their necks, but the Baltic leaders have been managing astonishingly well.

• Russian presidential candidate Ksenia Sobchak, a former TV star who has had the gall to challenge Putin in the March 18 presidential election. She’ll get only a tiny percentage of the vote but has inserted some real issues into statecontrolled TV coverage. (She is tolerated as a candidate, unlike the banned opposition leader Alexei Navalny, because her dad was a friend of Putin’s and her unthreatening presence gives Putin cover to claim the election is free.)

• And finally, it’s worth paying attention to the talented Michelle Bachelet, first Chilean president since 1932 to win twice in the presidential elections, as well as New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, who at 37 is the youngest prime minister in the world.

With such a tiny sample of women leaders, it’s hard to tell whether their performance is truly affected by gender or whether it reflects their countries’ cultures and histories in the same way it does for their male counterparts.

But we will never know until the sample is vastly expanded. And, if the Gender Gap report is correct, that won’t happen in my lifetime or yours. Trudy Rubin is a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist. © 2018, Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.