Is now the time for more female leadership?
On Friday 26th June I found myself listening to a discussion on Radio 4's Woman's Hour. Under the wider topic of re-thinking our world following the effects of the corona virus, the specific subject was: The harm of macho leadership.
I have long been aware of traditionally male traits and their negative effects on inclusivity and empowerment. Even some female leaders tend to follow suit in the mistaken aim that they have to compete on men's terms (think Maggie Thatcher on Spitting Image). Brian Eno, the well-known musician, introduced the discussion with the following thesis, which so impressed me that I transcribed it in its entirety for all.
If we've learned one thing from the corona virus experience, its that a certain style of government and leadership, a style that has dominated the last few years, isn't going to be of any use to us at all in the 21st Century.
The countries that have suffered worst from covid all share a single governmental style; macho, media savvy, authoritarian leaders whose primary talent is self-promotion, who lie freely when it suits them and who disregard scientific advice if it doesn’t enhance their own claims. These leaders gain power by manufacturing threats; mexicans, immigrants, muslims, europeans, liberals whatever you like, to create fake emergencies in which they can appear as saviours.
But in the face of an actual threat like the corona virus, all that macho posturing proved to be worse than useless.
What was needed was preparation, expertise, cooperation and good data, all complete mysteries to the macho mind.
Contrast the performance of America, England and Brazil; currently one, two and three in the mortality charts, with that of say Germany, New Zealand and Taiwan who have had much better results.
All those three countries have female leaders, as do many of the other nations with better than average outcomes from covid.
The nations that have done well spend more time listening to their scientists apparently than to their ideologues, and don’t consider evidence as a challenge to their manhood.
It’s to their examples that we must look for a future, because we’re running out of futures.
By that I mean we’re running out of choices about what kind of world we might inhabit; the urgency of climate change is propelling us towards two starkly contrasting visions. The first is the billionaires' utopia, where a few rich people secure themselves behind strong walls, while the rest of us collapse in a fireball.
The other vision is our only chance, where we re-think our institutions and global arrangements so that in dealing with the upcoming disruptions of climate change and pandemics, we build something new, something better than we have now.
This sounds idealistic, but in fact it’s the only option. We have to make a society that works in the long term, by valuing all its different intelligences, by engaging everybody rather than excluding most. It’s a future built on co-operation and inclusion, not division. We’ve seen the first green shoots of it in the better responses to covid and in the proliferation of anti-discrimination activism, which could also be called pro-inclusion activism.
If we want to live in a stable, creative society we need to re-think things so that everybody in it feels welcomed and valued.
The more people have an investment in society the more they’ll want to nurture and improve it. This isn’t about the winners being generous enough to share a bit of their spoils with the losers; it’s about realising that a world with a few winners and a lot of losers isn't a tenable world.