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She's got the power
Happy women’s history month! This week, we look at female representation in the US Congress and Canadian Parliament.
In Canada, Agnes Campbell Macphail became the first woman elected to the House of Commons and the first female parliamentarian in 1921. Jeannette Rankin from Montana broke the glass ceiling in the US by being the first woman elected to Congress in 1916. A year later, she earned a second distinction by joining 49 of her House colleagues in voting against US entry into World War I – a vote that destroyed her prospects for reelection in 1918.
Today, women are making gains but remain underrepresented in the House of Commons and Congress. The 44th federal general election in 2021 saw women win 103 of the 338 seats in the House of Commons, marking the first time women's representation in the House surpassed 30%. In the US Congress, there are 126 women in the 435-seat-strong House of Representatives and 25 women serving in the Senate.
The Graphic Truth: Female governance gap
March is International Women’s History month, but while women account for just over half the world’s population, the overwhelming majority of political leaders and policymakers globally are men. In fact, there are just six countries where women make up more than 50% of the national legislature, and only 31 countries (out of 193 UN member states) in which a woman is either head of state or head of government. Furthermore, only one G7 country - Italy - currently has an elected female leader. While some countries have introduced controversial gender quotas at various stages in the electoral process as a bid to increase female participation, there's lots of progress still to be made. Here's a look at the facts and figures.
The Graphic Truth: Women in power
Liz Truss is the shortest-serving PM in British history, but women heads of state and government across the world seem to be doing just fine. Some have yet to prove themselves — like Giorgia Meloni, who was sworn in Saturday as prime minister after riding a far-right election victory in Italy. Others have been at it for years, such as Sheikh Hasina, who’s provided stability that has given once-poor Bangladesh the highest GDP per capita ratio in South Asia. We list the world’s 18 female incumbents with executive authority and popular mandates to serve.
Plastic letters arranged to read "Inflation" are placed on British Pound banknote
Hard Numbers: BoE warns of recession, Joseph Stalin arrested, cops charged in Breonna Taylor death, Kenyan women lawmakers targeted
27: The Bank of England raised interest rates by 50 basis points on Thursday, its biggest hike in 27 years, and the bank warned that inflation will likely peak at a staggering 13.3% this fall with a drawn-out recession being all but inevitable.
50: Sri Lankan authorities are cracking down hard on protesters demonstrating against the country’s recent economic collapse. Joseph Stalin, a protest leader, was arrested this week for participating in a demonstration in May that marked 50 days since the launch of the mass protest movement, referred to as “the struggle.”
4: Four people – three US police officers and one former officer – have been charged with the 2020 death of Breonna Taylor at her apartment in Louisville, Kentucky. Taylor’s death sparked mass protests over the use of no-knock warrants by law enforcement and broader racial injustice.
12: When Kenyans head to the polls on Sunday to elect a new parliament and president, less than 12% of candidates they have to choose from will be women. Female candidates are facing a flood of online abuse ahead of the vote. In 2018, Kenyan politicians boycotted a parliamentary vote that would have guaranteed women one third of all parliamentary seats.Soldiers walk as they take part in a rescue operation after a heavy snowfall in Murree, Pakistan January 8, 2022.
Hard Numbers: Pakistani winter tragedy, Nigerian bandits, Tianjin testing, Saudi princess free
22: The scenic Pakistani hill station of Murree , about an hour’s drive from Islamabad, is a staple honeymoon destination and resort for holiday travelers. But on Saturday, at least 22 people, mostly tourists, were killed by a blizzard that trapped thousands on the single highway to the city. Authorities were blamed for not issuing weather advisories, nor coming to the aid of those stuck in their cars for hours.
200: Attacks by outlaws in northern Nigeria have spiked in recent days, with 200 people reportedly killed by motorbike-riding “bandits,” as local authorities call them, in response to military airstrikes against their hideouts in Zamfara state. The gangs have now been officially labeled “terrorists” by the Nigerian government.
14 million: The Chinese city of Tianjin is gearing up to test its 14 million residents in the next two days after discovering 20 COVID infections, including two with the omicron variant. China’s zero-COVID policy — which entails a full lockdown of Tianjin until everyone tests negative — will be tested during the upcoming Lunar New Year and especially the Beijing Olympics.
3: A Saudi princess and her daughter were released from jail after nearly three years. Princess Basma bin Saud, 57 and the youngest daughter of the late King Saud, was never charged with any crime but she was a known critic of the Saudi regime.Women in politics whose names you should know in 2022
Was it the year of the woman? Angela Merkel left the political stage. New Zealand's Jacinda Ardern and Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen were given gold stars for their respective responses to the pandemic. And Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya emerged as Belarus’ democracy warrior.
As COVID lingers – and thrives – it’s clear that 2022 will be packed with immensely complicated political problems for all countries. Many female leaders will be at the forefront of efforts to meet complex domestic and international challenges over the next 12 months. Here are four of them.
Britain’s Liz Truss
Liz Truss has many jobs. She is Minister for Women and Equalities, and after a cabinet reshuffle in the fall she was also tapped as Foreign Secretary. This week, she added to her portfolio the unenviable role of chief negotiator with the EU on all things Brexit. One of her priorities will be to chart a path forward on the future of the Northern Irish border, which has put London on a path toward trade war with Brussels and trouble with Washington. Truss, who has now held cabinet positions in three Tory governments, is also trying to mold Britain's post-Brexit foreign policy.
Timing is everything in politics, and Truss takes on this monster portfolio just as her boss, Boris Johnson, finds himself in the dog house after a series of bungled policies and communication strategies – as well as a string of tasteless scandals of the Marie Antoniette variety. Truss has already been floated as a potential successor to Johnson, who analysts say may now be on borrowed time. But her chance to become prime minister could depend on how painstaking talks with Brussels progress in the near term. Can she triumph where others have so far failed?
France’s Valerie Pécresse
Since entering the French presidential fray just a few weeks ago, Valerie Pécresse, who now heads the center-right Les Républicains party, has shaken up a race that has been incumbent Emmanuel Macron’s to lose. Pécress has been in politics for a long time, having advised former President Jacques Chirac in the late 1990s, and is now head of Paris’ sprawling regional government.
In winning her party’s presidential nomination, Pécresse became the first woman to head the party of Charles de Gaulle, a big feat in a country where women remain underrepresented in politics.
Pécresse’s near-term challenge will be twofold: First, she must convince an embittered French electorate that she has a plan to improve average people’s lives after two years of pandemic hell. So far, her tough-on-immigration and security message seems to be resonating with moderate voters across the political spectrum.
But Pécresse’s second trial will be one that her male counterparts don’t have to contend with: convincing voters with long-held views about gender and leadership that a woman can – and should – head the next government.
Israel’s Merav Michaeli
Eight ragtag parties joined forces this past summer to unseat Israel’s longtime premier Benjamin Netanyahu. Only one of them is led by a woman. Merav Michaeli, a 54-year old former journalist, heads the once-dominant Labor party, which has seen its political fortunes wither in recent years along with the rest of the Israeli left.
For the past six months, Michaeli – and the entire ideologically-diverse coalition – has been focused on survival, by keeping the governing bloc from collapsing. They’ve done that, having passed the first national budget in three years.
But there’s a lot riding on Michaeli’s leadership, and many are counting on her to rebuild the liberal party of Golda Meir and Yizhak Rabin that’s been in shambles: “I am here because this is my project — to turn it back into a ruling party,” she told the New York Times earlier this year.
It’s true that Michaeli has brought Labor back from the brink (the group had been in the opposition from 2009 to 2020). But it’s one thing to bring a party back from oblivion as part of a sweeping change movement. It’s another to return it to its peak as Israel’s “peace camp” when neither the Israelis nor the Palestinian Authority now seem particularly keen on upending the status quo. So then what does the revived Labor party stand for in post-Oslo 2022? Now that the onboarding period is over, it’ll be Michaeli’s job to let Israelis know.
Hungary’s Katalin Novak
When discussing the illiberal shift in Eastern European politics in recent years, the media conjures images of leaders who look like barely reformed apparatchiks with stubby fingers. Then there’s Hungary’s Katalin Novak, vice president of the ruling Fidesz party, touting the group’s right-wing populist message.
This week, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán tapped Novak to be Hungary’s first female president should he prevail in elections next spring. Novak, who is 44, is widely considered both attractive and articulate. Indeed, undecided voters might find Fidesz’s hard line on LGBTQ rights and so-called traditional family values more palatable when Novak, Hungary’s Minister of Family and Youth Affairs and recipient of France’s highest state honor in 2019, is delivering the message.
As president, Novak’s job would be mostly ceremonial, though she could delay the enactment of some laws and appoint judges and a national prosecutor, which might come in handy for Orbán. But will Novak’s sugar-and-spice image help pull Orban across the finish line as he faces a united opposition and the toughest political fight of his life?
Afghanistan’s next generation: a student shares her perspective on the US withdrawal
Shaista is a 22-year-old university student in Kabul, Afghanistan, and since she was two years old, her country has been occupied by American forces. Although she was fortunate to grow up in a relatively privileged situation with the ability to get an education, she says that nevertheless "the fear of losing my life has always been there." She shares her thoughts on the US troop withdrawal announcement and how worried she is about a Taliban takeover of her country.
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Women in power: Chile’s Michelle Bachelet
Whose job is it to keep an eye on the governments that kill, torture, and displace people? The officials who turn back asylum-seekers, abuse migrants, jail journalists, or smash the skulls of peaceful protesters?
That's more or less a day at the office for Michelle Bachelet. As the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights since 2018, the former two-time leftwing president of Chile is perhaps the most visible and influential voice on human rights in the world today.
Calling out the the worst. As High Commissioner, her job is to promote and monitor governments' protection of universal human rights and freedoms, as laid out in UN declarations and international law. Unjust detention, torture, repression of journalists, and discrimination are just a few of the targets of her work.
Her office has issued searing reports on, among other things, horrific abuses in the Philippines under tough-guy President Rodrigo Duterte's "war on drugs" campaign; the surge in killings by Brazilian police under Brazil's gun-loving; far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, and the erosion of human rights under the current government of Sri Lanka, whose leaders themselves are implicated in crimes committed during the civil war that ended there in 2009.
One of Bachelet's most influential reports to date was issued in 2019, on the human rights and rule of law crisis in Venezuela under the regime of strongman President Nicolas Maduro. It was a tricky undertaking — Maduro himself had invited the investigation, perhaps believing that Bachelet's left-wing bonafides would make it possible to turn the report into an exculpatory propaganda coup for his regime. No such luck. The 19-page report detailed a raft of abuses right as the world was keenly watching the (now largely defunct) opposition movement of Juan Guaidó.
She brings a personal perspective to this work. Bachelet was a teenager in Chile when rightwing General Augusto Pinochet took power in a coup in 1973. Bachelet's father, an Air Force General who opposed Pinochet, was arrested and died in prison after being tortured. Two years later, Bachelet and her mother were jailed by Pinochet's henchmen and subjected to psychological abuse themselves.
They fled into exile. But after several years abroad, Bachelet returned to Chile to study medicine and work in the Chilean health ministry where she developed a reputation among Chileans as a compassionate fighter on behalf of those left behind in a country that, despite its economic successes, is also one of the most unequal in the world.
Her election as Chile's president in 2006 was a watershed. Not only was Bachelet the first woman president in Chile's history, she was also the first president from the left since the end of Pinochet's regime, and the first female president in Latin America elected on her own merits (Argentina's Isabel Perón and Cristina Kirchner are welcome to disagree if they like). And the fact that she is an agnostic leftwing mother of three — "all of the sins together" she likes to say — added to the sense of change in a Catholic country where gender role expectations are often archaic.
She did not always succeed during her two, non-contiguous, terms as president. Her plans for expanding education and infrastructure fell short of their goals, partly because of flawed political strategy, and partly because of resistance from an established business and political elite hostile to change. But she also took criticism from some of her own supporters for her decision to take a pragmatic, non-confrontational approach to dealing with the legacy of the dictatorship in a country that is still deeply divided over the past.
Does her current work have an effect? Critics say that the High Commissioner's office is a toothless body, good at pointing out problems but powerless to solve them. Most countries don't take kindly to having their abuses exposed. (Bolsonaro even reacted with a swipe at Bachelet's dead father.) And any immediate successes, like Venezuela quietly releasing several political prisoners on the eve of her report's publication, are both small and rare.
Meanwhile, the UN Security Council, one of the main audiences for her reports, is riven by geopolitical rivalries among the permanent members (China, Russia, the US, UK, and France), which often deadlock the ability to address human rights abuses.
But at a time when democracy and rule of law are suffering globally — both because of authoritarian impulses in democracies and more assertive strongmen in autocracies — it is important to simply say and prove: these people's rights are being abused, these people's freedoms are being curtailed, these things are happening right now.
Michelle Bachelet's power is, then, to act as the world's most powerful voice for the voiceless. And in 2021, there are a great many people still waiting to be heard.
This article is part of GZERO Media's Women in Power Series, profiling female leaders around the world who hold positions of decisive power and influence in global politics.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this piece incorrectly stated that Eva Perón was president of Argentina, instead of Isabel. We regret the error.
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