By Gabrielle Wallace/Cronkite News, Arizona Mirror
12 November 2024

WASHINGTON – Women have led governments as presidents, prime ministers and chancellors in nearly one-third of the world’s countries. The defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris ensured that the 235-year-old glass ceiling in the United States was not broken.

“This will definitely happen,” said Jean Sinzdak, deputy director of the Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics.

Not yet.

In Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum was sworn in last month as the 66th president and the first woman on the list. Britain’s first female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, held office from 1979 to 1990; this makes him longer in office than all but six people who have lived in Downing Street since the title was first used in 1721.

Angela Merkel served as Germany’s first female chancellor from 2005 to 2021; this was longer than all but two since Otto von Bismarck. Indira Gandhi broke barriers in India when she became prime minister in 1966, three years before Golda Meir became Israel’s fourth prime minister.

The barrier has crumbled on every continent except Antarctica.

“The United States is unfortunately far behind other nations. “I think it’s going to be a slow process, but women are having better success getting statewide positions as governors and U.S. senators,” said Kim Fridkin, a political scientist at Arizona State University who studies women in politics.

Of the 193 current members of the United Nations, 13 have female leaders; nine of them are for the first time. Sixty of them have been led by women at some point, starting in Sri Lanka in 1960, according to Pew Research research.

45 people have served as president in the United States, starting with George Washington in 1789. Donald Trump’s re-election extended this streak. He was the 45th president and will be the 47th. Grover Cleveland also served in non-consecutive terms.

Until 2016, no major American political party even nominated a woman for president.

U.S. senator and former First Lady Hillary Clinton came close in 2008 but lost the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama. She joined his cabinet as Secretary of State, and with that additional credential, she snagged the 2016 nomination, but lost to Trump, just as Harris did on Tuesday, the second time Democrats put a woman on their ticket.

In 1984, former Vice President Walter Mondale appointed New York Representative Geraldine Ferraro as his Democratic running mate, making her the first female vice presidential candidate of a major party.

Mondale lost to President Ronald Reagan, but it was a significant step forward for women in politics.

Arizona Senator John McCain chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his vice president in 2008.

Harris became the third woman Biden nominated for vice president in 2020 and became the country’s first female vice president.

Five of the seven countries in the G7, the group of leading Western democracies, have elected a woman as their head of government: Canada, Germany, France, Britain and Italy, whose current prime minister is a woman.

Japan and the United States are excluded, and Canada’s only female prime minister, Kim Campbell, was in office for only five months in 1993.

14 members of the G20 have elected a woman for the top job. Apart from the five countries in the G7, this list includes Argentina, Australia, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Korea and Turkey, as well as the European Union.

The half-dozen or so countries left behind in the G20 include the United States, Japan and South Africa, as well as three democracies: Russia, Saudi Arabia and China.

“There are cultural factors. “There are certainly other countries that are more supportive of improving the status of women in general from a cultural perspective,” Sinzdak said.

Karen Beckwith, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University who studies women in politics in Western Europe and the USA, drew attention to the difference between the parliamentary system and the presidential system.

In parliamentary democracy, parties elect their leaders and voters decide whether to bring that party to power. In other words, voters decide whether a female party leader will become prime minister.

Party insiders can topple a leader in this system. A US president can only be removed from office by impeachment or if the cabinet invokes the 25th Amendment and declares the president incompetent. Neither occurred, but the House impeached three presidents who were later acquitted in the Senate: Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton and Trump, twice.

“Once a president is in office, he cannot be removed from office,” Beckwith said. “This may be part of the reluctance of political parties in the US.”

The first hurdle to being elected president is winning the nomination. Until recent decades, the talent pool for senators and governors was so male-dominated that women’s chances of getting a shot at national office were greatly diminished.

If the parties are truly committed to eventually electing a woman as president, they need to make deliberate efforts to recruit more women into lower offices, Sinzdak said.

Only 60 women have ever served in the U.S. Senate, according to Senate records; 25 of them are currently in office, accounting for a quarter of the chamber’s members. This includes retiring Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.

There are 126 women members of the 435 members of the U.S. House, as well as four women in non-voting seats from the U.S. territories and the District of Columbia, according to the Clerk of the House of Representatives.

This is an all-time high. But at the current rate of progress, Beckwith said it could take another 90 years to have equal numbers of men and women in Congress.

Arizona doesn’t seem to bat an eyelid when it comes to electing women to high office.

The state became the first state to have five women serve as governor, according to data from the Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics.

Arizona was also home to the “Fab Five”; These were the women elected to the top statewide offices of governor, secretary of state, attorney general, treasurer and superintendent of public instruction in 1998.

Paul Bentz, a conservative analyst at the consulting firm HighGround, said factors other than gender are working against Harris despite Arizona’s electoral history. This included his decision to focus on Trump’s negatives rather than his own proposals and the brevity of his campaign following Biden’s departure.

“He faced political difficulties” and “suffered attacks from which it was very difficult to reverse,” he said.

Fridkin added that women face a balancing act when running for office.

She said they had to reflect “positive female stereotypes” but also show that they were “tough, a strong leader, competent, and able to deal with issues that don’t fit gender stereotypes.”

Three days before Election Day, Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update host Michael Che outlined the double standards many pundits see for women. He made a long comment about Trump’s flaws and then joked: “But this lady had a weird laugh, so I still can’t decide.”

Politics is not the only area where there is a gender gap at the top. Only 10 percent of CEOs in the Fortune 500 are women, and nearly a quarter of them got the job last year.

Sinzdak is pleased that despite Harris’ defeat, her role as vice president and presidential candidate has helped normalize the idea of ​​female political leadership.

“Women are just part of the presidential election process, and that’s not unusual,” she said.

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