According to Jonathan Yerushalmy, in recent years, the growth in the number of female leaders around the world has plateaued and in 2023, a number of prominent female leaders have left office to be replaced by men.
Jonathan Yerushalmy / Guardian
On a recent speaking tour in Australia, Barack Obama offered up his idea on how to turn the tide on more than a decade of democratic erosion, to steer the world on to a path of sustainability and peace.
“I am actually convinced that if we could try an experiment in which every country on Earth was run by women for just two years … I am confident the world would tilt in a better direction.”
Obama’s interviewer – former Australian foreign minister Julie Bishop – replied saying female leaders would only need six months. Data, however, shows that even the far more modest goal of gender parity in global leadership remains distant.
Fewer than a third of the UN’s 193 member states have ever had a female leader*, and while the last two decades have seen a huge proportional rise in the number of women at the top of global politics, the actual numbers remain incredibly low.
Currently, just 12 UN member states have female leaders, down from 17 in 2022. Research from UN Women suggests that at the current rate, gender equality at the highest positions of power will not be reached for another 130 years.
In recent years, the growth in the number of female leaders around the world has plateaued and in 2023, a number of prominent female leaders have left office to be replaced by men.
In January, Jacinda Ardern resigned as prime minister of New Zealand saying she “no longer had enough in the tank” to do the job. Moldova’s Natalia Gavrilita quit as prime minister in February, blaming a series of crises caused by “Russian aggression”.
Nicola Sturgeon – while not represented in the above data as she was not the leader of a UN member state – stood down in February after more than eight years as Scotland’s first minister, saying the “time was right”.
Then on Sunday, Sanna Marin lost a closely fought election in Finland, bringing to an end her time as the world’s youngest prime minister.
Pressures of power
All of these leaders left high office for very different reasons, but Dr Federica Caso, a lecturer in international relations at La Trobe University, warns that growing militarisation across the world due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could spell uncertainty for all female leaders around the world.
A 2018 survey from Pew Research partly bears this out. When asked, the majority of US voters said there was no difference between male and female political leaders. The only exceptions were in areas such as education and healthcare – where women were deemed to be more effective – and national security and defence – where men were thought to do a better job.
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