Are women better leaders than men? - What in the World podcast, BBC World Service

Hello, it's Hannah Gelbart here. Welcome to this episode of what in the world from the BBC World Service. During the US presidential election campaign, there was a lot of talk about whether America might elect its first ever female president.

Now, as you know, that didn't happen. But it did happen for Mexico, Namibia and North Macedonia. All of those countries elected their first ever female presidents in 2024, and having women in these top jobs sparked that age old debate about whether female leaders do things differently to male ones.

So today, we're going to see if there is any evidence to suggest that women lead differently to men, or is it all based on stereotypes? So today we're going to be testing out some of these stereotypes, these generalizations, these big questions about gender and gender politics. And for the very first time, on What In The World in the studio, we are going to play a game of true or false.

And here to do that is Laura García, BBC journalist. Welcome back to the podcast. Thank you.

I'm ready with my cards. Yeah. So we have been looking up some kind of statements, right?

I'm really interested in this area and we've asked you to go away and find out whether they're true or false. Are you ready for your first question? I'm so ready.

You gave me homework to go and read, and there's nothing that I like more than homework and reading. I'm so over homework, Laura. And you can play along with us.

See if you can work out whether the answers to some of these are true or false. Are you ready for your first question? So this is false.

Actually, the first woman to be elected into this office was a prime minister in what we call Sri Lanka today but back then it was called Ceylon. And she came into power after her husband passed away and when she was campaigning to get re-elected or to get elected herself, she would cry. So people would call her the Weeping Widow and that's going to be a big part of what we're going to be talking about today.

These perceptions of how we expect men and women to behave and what the research shows about it. And there's this whole thing about grown men don't cry, right? So let's see.

Are you ready for number two? Let's do number two. True or false?

That one is true. Yeah, it's actually 6. 7% of world leaders.

But like you say, some of us just got our first female president. My home country of Mexico elected Claudia Sheinbaum last summer and it was a pretty big deal. Yeah.

Why was it such a big deal for Mexico? And how did it get there? So brief, quick intro to the history of Mexico.

We'd been having elections for 200 years, electing presidents, until Claudia Sheinbaum came into power. So that's an enormous setting to put it into place. If you also consider, for example, that my granny was born in Mexico in 1923, where women couldn't vote or hold a bank account on their own and now, a little bit over a century later, we have our first female president.

That's an enormous thing, right? We have some of the highest statistics for gender based violence in Latin America. The number of feminist sites in Mexico is only second to Brazil, according to UN figures.

But at the same time, there's been a huge step forward in legislation to guarantee kind of quotas in 50/50 representation in politics. What is Claudia Sheinbaum like? What is she like as a person?

What is she like as a president? How does she lead? Okay, Claudia Sheinbaum has a really interesting history because she's not a career politician.

She's always had one foot in politics and one foot in science. That's what she trained in. She's published loads of academic articles.

She was even part of a UN panel that got the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for their work on climate change and that translates into the positions that she's had in public life. She is very methodical. She's very direct.

She likes data. She's a scientist. And sometimes people read that in Mexico - and you can see that reflected in the press and in the comments that she gets as cold.

Now, whether that is because we're reading her as a woman, and that's very unusual for women in Mexico and what we expect women to be like, or whether we would say that regardless of her gender, it's a conversation that's a really interesting one to have. But her demeanour as a very kind of cool, calm, methodical politician has gotten her these kinds of headlines in Mexico. They called her 'Cold Claudia', 'La Fría Claudia'.

Interesting. Let's delve into that a bit more with our next 'true or false'? I'm just going to get it up here.

Okay. Have I got these upside down? No.

Nope. That is false. We have seen examples from all across the board.

Women, like men, have different personalities, right? And you can have people like, maybe, the images of Jacinda Ardern come to mind, who was prime minister of New Zealand, who would go and hug people. She cried in public at different events.

She was pregnant during her tenure and kind of showed the more, quote on quote, 'traditional' signs of femininity. And then you have people who can be really clear and really stern, like Claudia Sheinbaum who's direct. In the UK, you have the figure of Margaret Thatcher.

People would even call her the Iron Lady. So preparing for this episode, I spoke to Rosie Campbell, who is - and I'm going to read her title because I want to get it right, because she's worked really hard for it - not only is she a politics professor, but she's the Director of the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at King's College London. So their whole thing is analysing the data and understanding how women, not just in politics, but in business and in local government and different positions of leadership - how they transform their societies.

You know, one of the reasons it's difficult to think about, to assess, to research whether men and women have different leadership styles is we're often interested in the highest levels of leadership. So women heads of government or women CEOs, there are very small numbers of people that occupy those positions. So we haven't got a very big research pool to consider.

And when we look at slightly lower levels of leadership, for example, whether you've got more women politicians generally, we do see some differences in outcomes. There is some research showing that women more often adopt empathetic leadership styles, although men can adopt them too. But women are slightly more likely to.

But when you're looking at the very top levels of leadership, the processes that have allowed people to get there, men and women are such that it's very likely that the men and women who reach the top will be pretty similar, because they've had to go through the same incredibly difficult, fraught process to become, you know, a leader of a nation. Okay, Laura, on to the next one. True or false?

That one's true. So that we can see in the data and in the research really clearly, not just in King's College London, but in other things that I was reading, that look at how women impact policies, not just at a national level, but also at local level, right? And that has partly to do, and what the data shows, because of women's lived experience.

So if you have grown up responsible for caring for your brothers or sisters or for your parents, you're more interested in health issues. There's things that only women go through, like sexual health issues or things around maternity that then they look at and enact when they get into positions of power. Academics are very reluctant to say that this is because women care more about these issues for the sheer nature of being women, but it's more because of what we live through, right?

So you live through your problems and you decide and you realise, 'Oh, there's something that we can do to address this'. Nevertheless, I also want to bring an example back from Mexico because we were talking - it's made huge strides, we have gender parity laws for loads of different places in politics. So now there have to be 50/50 candidates.

That has reflected enormous changes at a national level. And that is reflected in loads of places in Latin America where the change for parity has gone on in Congress or the equivalent of Parliament, but it hasn't trickled down to local government where there's loads of other policies that can become enacted. And I remember a conversation I had with an academic from the National University in Mexico who analysed how many proposals - and this would have been in 2023 - were presented at a local level - how many of them were aimed at women?

And they read over 24,000 proposals for legislation across all the states of Mexico, and only around 16% of them had to do with issues that affect women. So I think the point that academics and researchers want us to keep in mind is that even though there is this relationship between getting more women into politics or in positions of power and more policies aimed at women, it's not necessarily because that's the only thing that women care about and will act upon when they're in positions of leadership. So let's hold that thought.

Get on to the next true or false. I want to talk a little bit about the things that women do. That one is also true.

Interestingly, though, maybe your first thought is, 'oh, because women are less corrupt than men'. The literature review doesn't show that. We can be equally corrupt, right?

Equality means we can be exactly what we want. That's kind of the idea behind the whole thing, right? Again, researchers would really caution us to be careful and not assume that it's because women are 'X' and men are 'Y'.

One of the reasons that they think in kind of like digging into the data is that because for a society to allow more women to get into power, a bunch of things have to change, that makes it a bit more equal, a bit fairer, where democracy functions better. That also translates into less corruption, so the correlation isn't necessarily, 'oh, get more women into power because women are less corrupt'. Changing society to allow more women get into power makes societies less corrupt.

So we're only really going to see women in these top jobs in certain societies. You're saying the ones that are more democratic and that maybe are a little bit less corrupt in the first place? Yes.

So it's not the woman who got into power that's fixing things. It's these conditions that allowed for women to get into these positions. Why else do some people think that it's important that we have more women in politics and leadership positions?

You also see this in business. So businesses with more diverse boards and women in leadership tend to have better results. And that's the business case argument.

Trying to find numbers to justify, 'oh, we need more women in power because they will, we will get a benefit from it'. There's a flip side to that, which is the social justice argument that we need more women in power because there's 50 odd percent of women in the world, and therefore that should be reflected in the structures of how we lead. But some researchers, like Rosie, would ask us not to forget the social justice argument.

So let's listen to Rosie. It's surprising that someone who has spent more than 20 years studying gender and politics, I'm often a bit uncomfortable when people ask me about whether women are different kinds of leaders from men, and I think that's because we tend to come to this debate expecting women to deliver something different. There's just a justice argument for why I think there should be as many women leaders as there are men.

But I'm not really sure that there's much evidence that women are better leaders per se. But the justice argument on its own sometimes doesn't seem to be enough, just because it's fair or it's the right thing, people want to see the business case. Is it going to transform their business?

Is it going to make it more profitable? And there's some mixed evidence around that. And again, I think a lot of that comes back to the fact that if you have a more meritocratic process, the best people will become leaders, you'll get better outcomes.

And of course, women are equally distributed amongst the best people. Laura, I hear what Rosie is saying. I hear what you're saying.

Maybe we've got the focus all wrong. And this is not the question we should be asking, but I still want a kind of round up of the evidence because you have been looking into this. Is there any evidence to suggest that women leaders do things differently?

I'll use my cards to answer. So yes, and no, and also maybe. Which is like, the most cop out answer ever but it's true because it depends, right?

So we have way more data about how women impact their communities when they're in power at local levels. And we can see that reflected in the policies and how they change. And the research from KCL and the kind of literature reviews do make a correlation between having more women in power and changes in societies.

What the data doesn't show, and what we still have to answer is whether that's because women innately do things differently, or because societies have to be different to allow for women to get into power. And also remembering that we have loads of different types of women leaders, just like we have loads of different types of leaders who are men, right? The difference between Giorgia Meloni or Marjorie Taylor Greene in the United States, or my president in Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum or Xiomara Castro in Honduras.

Everyone has a different way of leading. But we would say the same thing about men who are leaders and have completely different styles, right? For example, Keir Starmer in the UK or Donald Trump, who's just returned to the White House, or even the president of France, Emmanuel Macron.

And with so few women as leaders, less than 7%, there may not even be that much data available to really analyse and look at how women perform in these leadership roles. And that's the huge challenge because as a scientist - I mean, scientists are reluctant to make conclusions about anything in general - but if you're doing it with a limited bit of data, then it's even harder to see if they can find those correlations and for us to tell the stories of how different countries around the world keep electing women or not. Mexico and Namibia and North Macedonia.

It's your time. Exactly. Laura, thank you so much for joining me in the studio.

It's been great to have you. Woo, I'm glad I aced the quiz. Yeah, you really did.

You aced it. And thank you for joining us, too. This is What In The World from the BBC World Service.

I'm Hannah Gelbart, and we can't wait to have you back with us next time. See you then.