Obama Says Women Should Lead the World. Is He Right?

 For hundreds, thousands of years even, governments have come and gone. Some have lasted centuries. Some lasted mere days. There have been democracies, monarchies, socialist states, communist states, dictatorships and just about every other arrangement human beings have managed to dream up.

There is one thing they have had in common that is often overlooked, though. With remarkably few exceptions, the people at the top have always been men.

Recently, Barack Obama suggested something that is either a completely ridiculous idea or an obvious experiment we have somehow never bothered to conduct.

What if women were in charge?

Speaking with historian Doris Kearns Goodwin at Salem State University in Massachusetts on Monday, September 21, Obama said he had sometimes fantasized about putting women in charge of every government in the world for two years and then seeing what happened. He said he believed things would be better, while also acknowledging they would not be perfect.

He has made a similar argument before. In December 2019, at a leadership event in Singapore, he told the women in the room they were better than men and that two years of female leadership in every nation would bring significant improvements in living standards and outcomes.

My first reaction to the latest version was simple. About damn time someone said it.

Before anyone starts reaching for the nearest keyboard to explain why women are not magically better than men, relax. I agree with you. I don’t think women are inherently better leaders than men. I think there are roughly four billion women on this planet, and it seems strange that humanity has spent most of its existence handing the keys to men and then acting as though we have somehow completed the experiment. We haven’t.

We have tried kings, emperors, presidents, prime ministers, dictators, generals, czars, chancellors and whatever else a man with enough soldiers and a sufficiently large ego decided he ought to be called. We have allowed men to start wars, end wars, negotiate treaties, build economies, destroy economies, write constitutions, tear them up and occasionally spend enormous amounts of money deciding whether a road should have three lanes or four.

Some of those men were extraordinary leaders. Some were terrible. Most were somewhere in between, which is where most human beings tend to live. Through nearly all of it, though, men have been the ones holding the clipboard.

Women ought to get a turn holding it.

Nobody should expect them to gather around a conference table, look at the world’s problems and collectively decide that everyone should drink more water and get eight hours of sleep. Women are people, and people are complicated.

There would be ambitious women, compassionate women, terrible women, brilliant women, cautious women and women who would make decisions I would love. There would also be women who would make decisions that would make me want to throw my television through the window. We would judge them the way we should judge men, by whether they led well, protected their citizens, spent the money wisely or screwed things up.

Half the population is women. That means half the human experience belongs to people who, for most of history, were largely watching from the other side of the table while men decided what the table should look like. That perspective would change some things. We don’t know which, because we have never actually tried it on a global scale.

Of course, there is an argument that certain countries would never respect a woman leader. You can hear it already. What about countries where men are culturally expected to lead? What about governments where women are treated as inferior? What happens when a female head of state sits across from a man who doesn’t believe she should be sitting there?

That’s a problem. It is also a strange argument against female leadership. If a man refuses to respect a woman because she is a woman, the problem there isn’t the woman.

Respect doesn’t come from gender alone anyway. When I was in junior high, I had to spend after-school detention with a teacher who was the most intimidating human being I have ever encountered. She was a woman and I was a twelve-year-old boy, and I sat there trying very hard not to move. She never needed to be six-foot-five, carry a sword or command an army to run that classroom. A desk, a chair, a clock on the wall and a kid who suddenly developed a profound interest in behaving himself were enough.

Women would lead differently. A woman who has spent thirty years running a household budget, a classroom or a hospital floor notices different things and ranks different problems as urgent. After thousands of years of men being given the keys, why are we so certain that handing them to women for two years would be such a terrible experiment?

Maybe we would discover women are better at it. Maybe we would discover men were better at it. Maybe we would discover that neither sex has a monopoly on good leadership and that the quality of the person matters considerably more than the plumbing they were born with.

Or maybe, after two years, the women would hand the keys back and say, “Good luck, boys. We understand now why you were so tired.”

Who knows? We have never tried it. So perhaps the question isn’t whether women would be better leaders. Perhaps the question is why, after all this time, we are still so reluctant to find out.

So what do you think? Does Obama have a point, or is he off his rocker with this one?

By Justin Stewart Burns

Publisher, The Missouri Stream