OPEN MINDS Vogue celebrates game-changing women in fashion, politics and culture.
Grown-up ggirl powerp is finallyy here and the insular alpha male club that has long dominated the world’s most influential group of nations is, at last, on the vergeg of extinction. By EmmaKate Symons.y Illustrated by Tali Lennox.
“WE ARE HIGHLY SKILLED AT ACHIEVING OUR GOALS AND PLAYING WELL IN A TEAM”
When the heads of the world’s largest economies meet next year at the G20, they could deliver an unprecedented perfectly gender-balanced “class photo” among their top six: China’s Xi Jinping, Japan’s Shinzo Abe and France’s François Hollande at the same table as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister Theresa May and presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
This year is shaping up as the watershed moment of the female leader, while the world awaits Clinton’s poll-predicted victory in the race for the White House, making her the first female president of the US and the most powerful politician on earth.
If the former secretary of state, New York senator and first lady defeats Donald Trump and his legions of Hillary-hating “lock her up” backers, she will not only achieve her lifelong goal of breaking what she calls that “highest and hardest glass ceiling”, she will also head up a growing list of female heads of state and government at the summit of global power.
May was catapulted into Number 10 Downing Street in July when her conservative male colleagues self-immolated following the chaotic Brexit vote. The 60-year-old Oxford graduate is the second woman – after Margaret Thatcher – to become prime minister of Great Britain. In neighbouring Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon is first minister and there are also female leaders in Poland, Denmark and Norway. Liberia is also led by a woman, as is South Korea.
The United Nations could soon be run by a woman when Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s term expires (former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark is a frontrunner for the role), ending the natural succession of men to the throne.
Janet Yellen is the world’s most important central banker as head of the US Federal Reserve. French-born politician Christine Lagarde, who says women need “skin as thick as an old crocodile” to succeed in their careers and has often complained about excess libido in the room when she is the only femme, was this year nominated for her second five-year term at the International Monetary Fund. A woman already heads up the World Health Organisation and pressure has been growing to finally nominate the first female president of the World Bank.
British writer Janet Street-Porter hails the movement towards more female leadership. “We’ll cut to the chase, excise the peripheral and the extraneous crap,” she says. “We already multi-task. We are highly skilled at achieving our goals and playing well in a team. Women have been training all their lives for this moment.”
So are we witnessing a revolution in world politics and policy making, and will the rise of the female leader make a difference for the vast majority of ordinary women still labouring under the heavy disadvantages attributed to us as the so-called “second sex”?
For women of the US and around the world, a Hillary Clinton presidency would be a game changer, because she has promised to take her quest for gender equality international.
Unlike original Iron Lady Thatcher, who rarely promoted women even if she famously remarked that “if you want something done, ask a woman”, Clinton is a committed feminist. She has made improving the status of women a priority of her political life and presidential campaign platform. But she also embraces her role as a pioneer and has, over the years, made it seem “normal” that a woman could aspire to reach the heights of political power.
Or as Michelle Obama commented in her acclaimed oration in honour of the Democratic nominee at the party’s national convention: “Because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters and all of our sons and daughters now take for granted that a woman can be president of the US.”
American women lag far behind their rich-nation counterparts, including in Australia, which has already elected a woman as prime minister, Great Britain and Europe. The gap is apparent on political representation, maternity leave, universal quality healthcare for expectant mothers, quality affordable childcare and pay equity. Clinton has promised to do her best to improve their lot, and she may have a real chance to affect radical change if the Democrats manage to sweep to majorities in the House and Senate, allowing her to pass key legislation and appoint liberal judges to the Supreme Court. Even though she has struggled to attract the support and devotion of millennial female feminists and voters, the Democratic nominee is looking out for them.
Rebecca Traister, a New York-based feminist author of All the Single Ladies, a new book about the rise of the unmarried woman, even links the broader pattern of rising female world leaders to the trend towards expansion of opportunity for women outside traditional early marriage, which has enabled more women to get to the top of institutions from which they’d long been excluded.
“In the case of Hillary versus Trump, though she herself is married, the policy positions she supports and is making central to her campaign – paid family leave, subsidised early childhood education, higher minimum wage and lower college costs and debt burdens, along with equal pay protections – are all issues that are fundamental to women’s ability to live equally in the world and thus live outside of marriage should they want or need to,” Traister tells Vogue.
For all the excitement surrounding the new crop of women at the top of the world political tree, the overall picture is sobering. UN figures show only 19 women are heads of state or government, including unelected monarchs – which means that more than 90 per cent of those leaders are men. Parliamentary representation of women worldwide still hovers at a little over 20 per cent, female ministers are still quite rare internationally and female political and policy leaders, like their sisters in the corporate sector, suffer from the “glass cliff ” syndrome when they are brought in to deal with a crisis made my men. They are more likely to be elected or installed after a period of turmoil, and are thus more precarious and vulnerable to early ejection from their seats of power.
May is often cited as an example of the female leader seized upon to mop up the mess of the men who have left her in charge of negotiating the minefield that is taking Britain out of the European Union.
Then when things turn sour, female leaders can be subjected to higher standards and fiercer punishments as has been seen in Brazil with the recent impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff.
Despite their successes, the newly powerful sorority of female political leaders has most trouble dodging the slings and arrows of outrageous male politicians.
Before her elevation to prime minister, Britain’s May was more famous for her leopard-print kitten heels than her policies, and on the eve of her election she was called a “bloody difficult woman” by a Tory Party colleague. Merkel, like May, Sturgeon and other female leaders have faced hurtful criticism for being childless.
Clinton has been viciously and repeatedly vilified for flaunting her “woman card” by Trump, who only refers to her as “crooked Hillary”. She has endured mock trials and faux lynchings by senior Republicans egging on hysterical crowds screaming for her Continued on page 257