Women Who Led the World Against COVID-19

Written by Sanah Malik

As a child I did not really care who a leader was, as long as they were powerful. Slowly, I got used to the debates of lack of representation and why women weren’t given significant roles — but the damage was done. Even as I watched a movie and saw a woman playing an important leader…it seemed artificial, and almost unnatural because I thought maybe the directors were trying to please the audience with this “representation”. However, this Pandemic made me realize that women are natural leaders and they define how modern day diplomacy and democracy should look like. Nineteen out of approximately 200 countries of the world had a COVID-19 response like no other. Supriya Garikipati, a developmental economist at Liverpool University, co-author with Reading University’s Uma Kambhampati asserted, “When women-led countries were compared to countries similar to them along a range of characteristics, they performed better, experienced fewer cases as well as fewer deaths”.

The early success of leaders such as Germany’s Angela Merkel, New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen, Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen and Finland’s Sanna Marin to tackle the pandemic should have been frequently talked about and made more headlines but alas, we were mourning the incompetent male leadership styles in the USA and the UK.

Nonetheless, women leaders reacted quickly and decisively in the face of adversity. Tsai Ing-wen, introduced 124 measures to block the spread of the virus at the first signs of illness, while Jacinda Arden imposed self-isolation on people entering New Zealand astonishingly early. Iceland, under the leadership of Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir, offered free coronavirus testing to all its citizens and screened five times as many people as South Korea did at the onset of the virus. Furthermore, the world’s youngest head of state and Prime Minister of Finland, Sanna Marin used social media influencers to spread fact based information on managing the virus to every citizen of the country and Norway’s Prime Minister, Erna Solberg, had the innovative idea of using television to talk directly to her country’s children in a press conference where no adults were allowed- to explain why it was okay to feel afraid. Women holding other offices like Rwandan cabinet member, Clare Akamanzi and mayor of Freetown, Sierra Leone, Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr organised isolation centres and kits, while actively focusing on post-Covid recovery. Garikipati said the evidence of a “significant and systematic difference” showed that even accounting for institutional context and other controls, “being female-led has provided countries with an advantage in the current crisis as in almost all cases, they locked down earlier than male leaders in similar circumstances. While this may have longer-term economic implications, it has certainly helped these countries to save lives, as evidenced by the significantly lower number of deaths in these countries.”

These leaders approached the issue in an “interpersonally-oriented manner” where they adopted a more democratic and participative style while employing excellent communications skills.

The most powerful leaders, politicians and diplomats happened to be women never put in frames…

In 2021, let’s prevent these stories from going down in flames.