Robert Buddan
SOME FEMALE leaders resign themselves to being women in a man's world. They see their role as women doing a man's job. They don't believe they can change the masculine way men organise the world. Men organise things in a command (top-down) way rather than a communal way. These women allow themselves to be bossy the way they see men behave. They are either oblivious to the masculine mode of organisation or believe it is futile to try and change it.
There is a new view of politics emerging, however. Just as some socialists have believed that it is possible to develop socialism within capitalism, gender movements believe that women can transform the overly competitive relations of market and democracy into more compassionate ones. Feminist politics believes in making society more equal, caring and nurturing. President Michelle Bachelet in Chile a socialist and a woman believes she can make the market and democracy more socialist and more feminist.
American men have failed, after all, to produce the 'kinder, gentler' society George Bush Sr. promised, and British voters were not convinced that their Conservative party could provide the 'compassionate conservatism' it spoke about. Portia Simpson Miller has offered to be 'tough and tender', tough on family issues but tender the way women are. At the International Women's Day rally, she called for peace, love, harmony, and unity, all themes of feminine leadership. She believes that uptown and downtown women should unite against class division. If 'man to man is so unjust' probably class conflict can be mended by women's solidarity.
STUDYING WOMEN'S POLITICS
Much of this is still theoretical since there are so few women in politics, especially in top positions, and even then there are few studies of what difference they have made as women. A woman was first elected head of government in Mongolia in 1953. Only a handful has made it between then and 1990. But since then, the trend has picked up. Liberia, Chile, Germany, The Philippines, New Zealand, and Finland have female executives. Sonia Gandhi heads the ruling party in India although the Prime Minister is male. There are female ceremonial leaders in Ireland, Canada and, of course, the U.K. March is a good month for women executives. The president of Finland began her second term on March 1, Bachelet of Chile was sworn in on March 11, and Portia Simpson Miller will take the oath on March 30.
There is still resistance in some places. Japanese law bans women from ascending to the throne and although a new law wants to change this, the people are protesting it. When International Women's Day was celebrated on March 8, the U.N. said that although women's positions were improving, they were not improving fast enough.
In some European parliaments, quota systems have expanded women's parliamentary presence.
But in South America only three women have been presidents in the last 30 years (before Bachelet) and they had spent only three years in power between them, either completing the terms of their dead husbands, or otherwise acting in an interim capacity.
The Commonwealth Caribbean has only had two female heads of government <\#150> Janet Jagan in Guyana and Eugenia Charles in Dominica. If you include Haiti, there was Ertha Pascal Trouillot, who assumed the role of provisional president in 1990/91, in her capacity as head of the Supreme Court. Claudette Werleigh was prime minister of Haiti for four months between November 1995 and February 1996. These were appointed positions. In Haiti's presidential elections of February 7, the lone female candidate only received 0.28% of the votes finishing 22nd out of 35.
Asia has produced a few female prime ministers and presidents. But most have come from family dynasties. Things are changing though. In 1993, India made a law that thirty-three percent of the positions on all village councils should be reserved for women. This has brought one million women into India's local government. India is not just the world's largest democracy; it is the world's largest female democracy.
THE MURPHY BROWN MODEL
Religion, family, business, and politics all remain male-dominant institutions. Feminist politics reject the masculine model of organisation, based as it is on hierarchy and authoritarianism, especially since women are often at the bottom of the hierarchy and victims of authority.
Sometimes women respond by trying to beat men at their own game. The 1980s produced the 'Murphy Brown' culture in the United States by which successful women were supposed to imitate men. Murphy Brown women began to wear power suits and to act bitchy, bossy, and manipulative. Women's liberation had come to mean being like one of the boys.
At the same time a survey of women in leadership in the US found that women really stressed co-operation over competition and teamwork over hierarchical command structures. They trusted intuition over purely rational reasoning, and placed more emphasis on long-term quality gains than short-term results.
We should be warned about over-generalising. 'Iron Ladies' like Margaret Thatcher and Eugenia Charles were closer fits to the masculine model. But, even psychological studies say that women are more sensitive about the feelings of others and juggle responsibilities better.
The difference between the models is not just over style. Ross Sheil (Sunday Gleaner, March 5, 2006) caught the sense of gendered economic models, associating Thatcher with a 'masculine, free-market policy agenda'. Indeed, the whole ultra-competitive and conservative structural adjustment model was quintessentially masculine wedded to the jungle theory by which only the fittest survive. The World Bank model of good governance is a softer version of the market model. But in the last 16 years, new thinking about democracy and development have come to embrace more inclusive ideas of governance that are closer to the feminine model of leadership.
GOVERNANCE AND THE NEW LEADERSHIP
The masculine mode of leadership has come in for severe criticism, especially executive leadership in politics and business. The preferred style is one that is participatory, non-hierarchical, flexible and group-oriented. More people are turning to it. All the institutions promoting good governance do. Scholars of political systems are also doing so. One political scientist has found that consensual political systems produce kinder and gentler politics, especially in welfare, justice and the environment. Like many, he is critical of the winner-takes-all formula of the Westminster system. It is the political version of the law of the jungle where the winner vanquishes the loser. It follows the same logic as the logic behind military tactics. No wonder feminists say that war is a form of male politics.
Probably Portia Simpson Miller is a beneficiary of a broader change where people are rejecting one form of politics for another. Jamaicans are used to seeing politics as a contest between parties. What might be happening is that politics is becoming a choice between forms of politics, and Portia Simpson Miller and the PNP, which after all has been stronger on women and children's issues, better represent the preferred form. If this is so then she has a great opportunity to bring people from different kinds of parties, classes, communities, and genders together to dissolve these older forms of competition with newer ones based on compassion. She has the new model of governance on her side.
Robert Buddan is a lecturer in the department of Government at the University of the West Indies. You can send your comments to Robert.Buddan@uwimona.edu.jm
