German Chancellor Angela Merkel (L) and pregnant New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speak to the media following talks at the Chancellery on April 17, 2018 in Berlin, Germany.

From Byline Times: Does COVID-19 Prove Women Are Best Suited to Lead in a Crisis?

There are many lessons to be learnt from the COVID-19 pandemic and one of them might be how the world is in desperate need of a greater number of women at the highest level of politics.

In the global fight against the Coronavirus, New Zealand and Germany are notable exceptions, with the former having almost completely “squashed” the virus after recording only one death, and the latter experiencing nowhere near the level of suffering that’s occurring in France, Italy, Spain, Russia, the Netherlands and the UK.

New Zealand and Germany are also notable for the fact that both have female leaders – Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Chancellor Angela Merkel, an all too rare reality in the sphere of international politics.

Ardern’s handling of the crisis has been described as a “masterclass” in political leadership, with Professor Michael Baker – one of the world’s leading epidemiologists – describing New Zealand as a “huge standout as the only Western country that’s got an elimination goal” for the virus, while Merkel has been lauded for pulling out the “bazooka” against the threat.

Certainly, there are an array of complex layers as to why some countries are outperforming others in combating the virus, but isn’t it worth exploring whether or not female leadership – or a lack thereof – is a factor in a nation’s ability to tackle an existential crisis?

Are New Zealand and Germany outperforming their peers because women leaders are less political, more decisive, more deferential to qualified expertise or cooler in a crisis?

The clues to this riddle might lie in a study published by the Harvard Business Review in 2019, which found that women outscored men on 17 of the 19 capabilities that differentiate excellent leaders from average or poor ones.

“Women were rated as excelling in taking initiative, acting with resilience, practicing self-development, driving for results, and displaying high integrity and honesty,” it found. “In fact, they were thought to be more effective in 84% of the competencies that we most frequently measure.”

More here.

Also, from Rebecca Solnit’s long read, ‘The impossible has already happened: what coronavirus can teach us about hope”, an amazing closing passage of womanly thinking:

When a caterpillar enters its chrysalis, it dissolves itself, quite literally, into liquid. In this state, what was a caterpillar and will be a butterfly is neither one nor the other, it’s a sort of living soup. Within this living soup are the imaginal cells that will catalyse its transformation into winged maturity.

May the best among us, the most visionary, the most inclusive, be the imaginal cells – for now we are in the soup. The outcome of disasters is not foreordained. It’s a conflict, one that takes place while things that were frozen, solid and locked up have become open and fluid – full of both the best and worst possibilities. We are both becalmed and in a state of profound change.

But this is also a time of depth for those spending more time at home and more time alone, looking outward at this unanticipated world. We often divide emotions into good and bad, happy and sad, but I think they can equally be divided into shallow and deep, and the pursuit of what is supposed to be happiness is often a flight from depth, from one’s own interior life and the suffering around us – and not being happy is often framed as a failure.

But there is meaning as well as pain in sadness, mourning and grief, the emotions born of empathy and solidarity. If you are sad and frightened, it is a sign that you care, that you are connected in spirit. If you are overwhelmed – well, it is overwhelming, and it will take decades of study, analysis, discussion and contemplation to understand how and why 2020 suddenly took us all into marshy new territory.

Seven years ago, Patrisse Cullors wrote a sort of mission statement for Black Lives Matter: “Provide hope and inspiration for collective action to build collective power to achieve collective transformation. Rooted in grief and rage but pointed towards vision and dreams.”

It is beautiful not only because it is hopeful, not only because then Black Lives Matter set out and did transformative work, but because it acknowledges that hope can coexist with difficulty and suffering. The sadness in the depths and the fury that burns above are not incompatible with hope, because we are complex creatures, because hope is not optimism that everything will be fine regardless.

Hope offers us clarity that, amid the uncertainty ahead, there will be conflicts worth joining and the possibility of winning some of them. And one of the things most dangerous to this hope is the lapse into believing that everything was fine before disaster struck, and that all we need to do is return to things as they were.

Ordinary life before the pandemic was already a catastrophe of desperation and exclusion for too many human beings, an environmental and climate catastrophe, an obscenity of inequality. It is too soon to know what will emerge from this emergency, but not too soon to start looking for chances to help decide it. It is, I believe, what many of us are preparing to do.

More here.

And note the UN’s recent statement, "Put women and girls at the centre of efforts to recover from COVID-19", and their supporting paper.

Women's leadership - at every level of society - is proving to be the surest guide through the difficulties of Coronavirus