Michael McGuire: Female-led countries do better in handling COVID
It is clear that female-led countries have fared better in terms of absolute number of COVID-cases and deaths, writes Michael McGuire.
Opinion
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This probably won’t come as a surprise to any women. And probably not to a lot of blokes either if they are being entirely honest with themselves.
Turns out countries with female leaders are coping with the COVID-19 pandemic a lot better than those with males in charge. There’s many reasons for this but it boils down to women being less willing to take risks with other people’s lives than men.
A study came out this week from a couple of English academics, Supriya Garikipati and Uma Kambhampati, which looked at the COVID numbers from 194 countries.
Possibly the first thing to note was how little of the globe has a women in charge. Of those 194 countries, only 19 were led by women, which is less than 10 per cent.
Still, enough to be able to draw a few conclusions.
“The performance of female leaders in the COVID pandemic offers a unique global experiment in national crisis management where various issue, including that of effectiveness of leadership, can be examined across countries,’’ the authors wrote.
And what did they find?
“It is clear that female-led countries have fared better in terms of absolute number of COVID-cases and deaths, with male-led countries having nearly the double of deaths as female-led ones.’’
To try and further shore up the argument, Garikipati and Kambhampati eliminated the outliers from the study: the nations that had done best and the ones that were the worst.
So Jacinda Ardern’s New Zealand was removed from the list. Despite a recent uptick, Ardern’s quick decision to lock her country down was decisive in New Zealand quashing the virus.
The other country taken out was the US. The vast incompetence of US president Donald Trump in dealing with COVID has been well documented.
Trump’s refusal to take the virus seriously, his contention that it would one day “disappear’’, his conjecture that a possible cure could be the injection of bleach, have all led the US to recording the highest number of cases and deaths in the world.
But even when removing the extremes from the data, the result held up.
Again, possibly not that surprising. Look at UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. He caught the virus. But not before saying: “I was at a hospital where there were a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody.’’
Brazil offered Jair Bolsanaro, another who dismissed the virus as “a little flu’’.
The conclusion the report came to was that female leaders were more decisive than men, but also: “Women were less willing to take risks with lives, but were more willing to accept risks in relations to the early lockdown of economies.’’
The report also references another study which suggested men “are more confident of success in uncertain situations than women’’.
Which will come as no shock to anyone who has seen a man attempt to put together a furniture pack from Ikea.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been seen to handle the virus quite well, even it at times it seems as if he has had to be directed towards a decision that was initially at odds with his instincts. Witness his declaration in March he was going to the footy that weekend at a press conference held to announce the government was banning large gatherings from the following Monday.
It’s obvious more women are needed in positions of leadership. Morrison’s cabinet of 23 has 17 men. There are only three women in Steven Marshall’s 14-person cabinet. And it’s not just politics where women struggle for parity.
The most recent survey by Chief Executive Women found in 2019 only two of the 25 chief executives appointed in 2019 to lead one of Australia’s top 200 companies were women. It also found women only held 6 per cent of those chief executive positions, down from 7 per cent the previous year.
CEW president Sue Morphet said at the time that on those numbers, it would be another 80 years before gender equality became a reality in the business world.
It’s time to pick up the pace of change.