Do female politicians do things differently from men?
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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 president in 2024. And how did that happen?

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?

To test out some of those stereotypes, those generalizations, we are going to be doing a game of true or false. And here to talk us through it, to work it all out and to answer some of these questions is Laura Garcia, BBC journalist. Hey. Welcome back onto the podcast. Thank you for having me. No pressure. Are you ready to bust some stereotypes? Let's do it. Okay. Number one, true or false?

The first woman to be elected head of state was in Europe. So that 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. She came into power after her husband passed away. And when she was campaigning to get elected herself, she would cry. So people would call her the weeping widow. And that's going to be...

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. Okay, you ready for number two? Yes. True or false. Women make up less than 7% of world leaders. That one is true. 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. 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? Yeah. We have some of the highest statistics for gender-based violence in Latin America. The number of feminicides in Mexico is only second to Brazil, according to UN figures. But at the same time, there's been huge step forward in legislation to guarantee kind of quotas and 50-50 representation in politics. And what is Claudia Sheinbaum like? What is she like as a person? What is she like as a president? How does she lead?

So, Claudia Sheinbaum has a really interesting history because she's always had one foot in politics and one foot in science. She is trained and has studied and published loads of academic articles as a climate engineer. 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. Let's delve into that a bit more with our next true or false. OK, women leaders only succeed by acting like men.

That is both. 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 unquote, traditional signs of femininity. And then you have people who can be really clear and really stern, like Claudia Sherman, who's direct. In the UK, you have the figure of Margaret Thatcher. People would even call her the Iron Lady. Mm-hmm.

So preparing for this episode, I spoke to Rosie Campbell. 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 slightly more likely to. 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 a leader of a nation.

What I'm hearing is actually it's not all that binary. It's not all that stereotype. You have people and people lead differently depending on who they are and their personalities. But there's something about the societies that they're in and also the personal characteristics, the resilience, the competition, the hardworking people.

nature to get to those top jobs that might actually help kind of define the people, whether women or men, that we see in power. Okay, Laura, on to the next one. True or false? Women in politics are more likely to bring in policies that benefit women.

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 at an act 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 realize, 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 worldwide.

at a national level, but it hasn't trickled down to local government. And I remember a conversation I had with an academic from the National University in Mexico who analyzed how many proposals in, 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. Okay, so let's hold that thought, get on to the next true or false. When women are in charge, there is less corruption. 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. So we can be equally corrupt, right? Yeah, well, 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.

You've smashed it on the true and false, by the way. You absolutely smashed it. Did my homework, man. Good. Did my homework. I'm glad you did. And we've kind of touched on this a little bit, like how women in power bring in more female-led policies. There's some evidence there's less corruption. Yeah.

Why else do some people think that it's important that we have more women in politics and leadership positions? The UN, for example, says that it helps to advance legislation on health, education, childcare, all these things we've been talking about. 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 coin 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. Some researchers like Rosie would ask us not to forget the social justice argument. If we're half of the world's population, then we should be reflected in the leadership. 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. 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

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's 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 to 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'm going to 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. 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 Georgia Maloney or Marjorie Taylor Greene in the United States or...

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, right, less than 7%, there may not even be that much data available to really analyze and look at how women perform in these leadership roles. And that's a 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. ♪

Thank you so much for joining me in the studio. It's been great to have you. I'm glad I aced the quiz. Yeah, you did. You aced it. You absolutely 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. Joining me in the studio is a science someone who always makes me smile. Unexpected Elements brings you the most surprising science ever.

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