It’s a claim that went viral quickly: women leaders were more likely to crush it in the pandemic than their male counterparts. At first, few seemed to question whether this were true, though plenty debated why it would be so. Was it because of the women themselves, and their more “female” leadership style? Or was it a signal about the societies that elected them? Whatever the explanation, belief in the phenomenon itself may have only gained adherents since. “There seems to be a pattern here,” tweeted the prominent physician Eric Topol just the other day, noting there is now “real data to back this up.”
On one level, I get it. I’m a firm believer in the importance and benefits of diversity in leadership, including gender diversity. And I, too, have Jacinda-Ardern-envy: the New Zealand prime minister’s ability to ace any given task leaves me in equal parts impressed and wishing, “if only.” Angela Merkel’s off-the-cuff explanations of epidemiological concepts have been a joy. My longing for this sort of leadership was intensified by living in the U.S. for the first two years of its reality-TV presidency—and I’m no fan of the (male) prime minister of my home, Australia, either. But jumping from so few examples to the conclusion that the gender of political leaders has been decisive during this pandemic? That just looked to me like confirmation bias.
The theory, in its standard form, skated over certain inconvenient facts; for instance, how early it was in the pandemic, and how badly some “women-led” countries were doing. One particularly prominent story—with more than 8 million views as I’m writing—came out on April 13 in Forbes. The author, a professional gender-balance consultant, made her case with a few cherry-picked countries. Not mentioned? The fact that Belgium, led by Sophie Wilmès, was notching up the world’s highest rate of Covid-19 deaths per million population for any country (other than a microstate in northern Italy). Another story in this genre began by singling out Silveria Jacobs, the prime minister of Sint Maarten in the Caribbean, for her exemplary handling of the pandemic’s risks. According to Worldometer, Sint Maarten currently has the twelfth-worst rate of Covid-19 mortality per million among all listed countries and territories. Given that women make up about 10 percent of national leaders, the presence of Wilmès and Jacobs on the bottom-20 list for this key metric doesn’t support the thesis that women leaders are doing any better (or any worse) than men.
Women leaders are still so unusual that they stand out and draw a lot of scrutiny. I needed more than a few high-profile cases of their success—Ardern, Merkel, Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-Wen, etc.—to have an opinion about the women pandemic better narrative. So a few weeks ago I did some very crude calculations based on data sources that are themselves pretty crude. For example, I used Wikipedia’s list of 22 current elected or appointed female heads of state and government, without differentiating whether each woman was a governing leader, such as Norway’s prime minister Erna Solberg, or serving in more of a titular role, such as Slovakia’s president Zuzana Čaputová. (The media narratives mostly avoid this distinction, too.) The “women-led” countries were not more likely to have below-average mortality rates per million population. That doesn’t answer the question about leadership performance, of course, but it left me skeptical.
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Now we have more formal data. Two sets of academics tried to analyze differences in Covid-19 outcomes among countries with men and women leaders, and they posted their results as preprints in June. Each concluded that countries led by women have done better. But not only were both studies vulnerable to bias; neither found a statistically-significant overall difference based on gender. Their approaches could not overco
