Women-leading countries treat pandemics much better than men: study

• Women-led countries have responded better to the coronavirus pandemic than those led by men, according to a new study.
• The study of 194 countries found that “female leadership has given countries an advantage in the current crisis.” The study has not been peer reviewed.
• Male-led countries such as the US, Italy, Brazil, and the United Kingdom have far higher death rates than female-led countries such as Germany, New Zealand, Taiwan, and Finland.
• The authors say this is not a coincidence, claiming that women leaders communicated better and closed faster, and as a result experienced far fewer deaths in general.
• The argument that women make for more compassionate, effective leaders has grown in popularity during the pandemic, as many male leaders have been criticized for taking unnecessary risks.
• Visit the Business Insider website for more stories.

Countries with female leaders have treated the coronavirus pandemic “systematically and significantly better” than those carried out by men, according to a new research document.

A study of 194 countries by Supriya Garikipati, of the University of Liverpool, and Uma Kambhampati, of the University of Reading, found that “female leadership has given countries an advantage in the current crisis.”

In early June, a preview of the paper, which had not been peer reviewed, was posted on SSRN. The authors also wrote recently about their research in a blog post for the World Economic Forum.

To the forefront, countries such as the US, Spain, Italy, Brazil and the United Kingdom have done extremely poorly in the pandemic, recording some of the highest death tolls in the world.

Meanwhile, countries led by women such as Germany, Denmark, New Zealand, Taiwan, Iceland, and Finland recorded far fewer deaths and lower death rates. (It is worth noting that some male-led countries, such as the Czech Republic and Greece, have also recorded lower deaths.)

The authors studied cause of death and cause, as leaders took decisive action to block it, and whether “clear communication styles” were employed. They concluded that countries led by women are measurably better.

“Our findings show that COVID outcomes are systematically and significantly better in women-led countries and, to some extent, this can be explained by the proactive policy response they have adopted,” she wrote in her World blog post Economic Forum.

For example, New Zealand laid a deadlock long before cases began to spin out of control, with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern saying on March 15 that it was time to “go hard and go early.”

Of the 194 countries studied in the newspaper – titled “Leading the Fight Against the Pandemic: Does Gender ‘Really’ Matter?” – nineteen had female leaders. Data used in the paper span from the beginning of the pandemic in those countries until May 18th.

The authors also compared each of the 19 women led with their neighbors to see if the trend continued.

“Control for GDP per capita, population, size of urban population and of elderly, countries with female leadership perform significantly better than countries led by men,” they said.

Evidence that suggests women care for better, more empathetic leaders has come to the forefront of political discourse in recent years, and even more so during the pandemic.

In June 2020, former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said there was “a correlation” between countries with female leadership and positive responses to the coronavirus.

Former President Barack Obama also said in December 2019 that he “was absolutely confident that two years if every nation on earth were ruled by women, you would see a significant improvement across the board over just about everything.”

Since the paper was completed on June 3, the coronavirus pandemic has raged, but countries with female leaders have kept their outbreaks under relative control.

Earlier this month, New Zealand registered a new outbreak after more than 100 consecutive days of zero new coronavirus. Ardern immediately reinstated restricted restrictions in Auckland, the city where the cases were found, and postponed elections for a month.

The authors noted in the blog post that although no conclusions can be drawn from coronavirus deaths alone, “countries led by women have fared better in terms of absolute number of COVID cases and deaths, with countries led by men almost double the number of deaths. “