While speaking at an event on leadership in December 2019, former US President Barak Obama envisioned what a world run by women would be like: “If women ran every country in the world, there would be a general improvement in living standards and outcomes. They are indisputably better than men, and most problems in the world came from old people, mostly men, holding onto positions of power. I’m absolutely confident that if, for two years, every nation on earth was run by women, you would see a significant improvement across the board on just about everything, living standards and outcomes.”
President Obama’s foretelling of a better world run by women is already being demonstrated. In addition to the pioneering and pervasive contributions each of this book’s thirty interviewees have already accomplished, here is just a sampling of the achievements of female world leaders in the past few months:
In December 2019, Iceland’s prime minister, Katrin Jakobssdottir, called for prioritizing environmental and social factors in their budgets over gross domestic product. “We need an alternative future based on wellbeing and inclusive growth,” she said.
Earlier that year, when New Zealand was victimized by a terrorist attack in Christchurch, taking the lives of fifty people, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern enacted immediate and sweeping changes to the country’s gun laws by banning all assault rifles and military-style semiautomatic weapons, while also modeling how a compassionate head of state leads. The very next day, she wore a black head scarf in solidarity with Muslim leaders. During her meeting with them, rather than telling them what she planned to do to help her country heal, she asked them what they would like her to do. She also refused to name Islamophobia as the cause of the massacre, minimizing the potential for increased discrimination.
New Zealand and Iceland are both members of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, a network of countries that are developing frameworks to measure social, economic, and environmental factors in a way that allows countries to prioritize mental health, domestic violence, and child poverty instead of GDP, which has long been considered the sole measure of a country’s success.
In Finland, Sanna Marin, who was also elected prime minister in December 2019, instituted a government where the leaders of all five parts are women. Further, by making quality of life a priority, she recently proposed a four-day workweek and a six-hour workday. “Why couldn’t it be the next step?” she asked. “I believe people deserve to spend more time with their families, loved ones, hobbies, and other aspects of life, such as culture. This could be the next step for us in working life.”
In March 2019, Slovakia elected its first female president, Zuzana Caputova. A former environmental activist, she vowed not only to fight impunity in a country where large-scale political corruption exists, but she’s also making environmental protection a priority.
And in Greece, Katerina Sakellaropoulou was elected that country’s first female president on January 22, 2020. She has also made saving the environment her mission. She was the former chair of the Hellenic Society for Environmental Law since 2015 and the recipient of the 2016 Goldman Environmental Prize, awarded annually to grassroots environmental activists.
The commitment of female leaders to building a better world is not restricted to these countries, however. According to a 2019 study by Astghik Mavisakalyan, an economics professor at Australia’s Curtin University who recently examined the legislatures of ninety-one countries, the larger the percentage of seats held by women, the stronger each country’s climate policies. Further, her study found that a higher representation of females in parliament results in lower carbon dioxide emissions. She concluded that female political representation may be an underutilized tool for addressing climate change.
All of this confirms and validates the sentiment expressed by Ambassador Swanee Hunt, one of the thirty interviewees in this book, in her June 2019 political op-ed entitled “What Happens When Women Rule.” Citing Nevada, which became the first US state with a majority female legislature (52 percent), and Colorado, second to Nevada with 47 percent women, Swanee pointed out that Nevada passed the Trust Nevada Women Act, which removed criminal penalties for abortions and other barriers to reproductive healthcare. And in Colorado, a bill was passed to move the state toward paid family leave, and a new plan was developed to reduce greenhouse gases.
“It turns out the [glass] ceiling was in our heads,” Swanee wrote. “We are now feeling the earth move under our feet.”