Women's Leadership

The daughter of an abattoir worker and fruit picker, Sepuloni could have exactly the expertise the PM needs to tackle a brutal cost of living crisis

C armel Sepuloni admits her father, who arrived from Samoa in 1964 unable to speak English, had difficulty taking in the news that his daughter was shortly to become New Zealand’s first Pasifika deputy prime minister.

“To think that he could come here to work on the railways and the freezing works [abattoir] and marry a sheep farmer’s daughter and have a daughter who would become the deputy prime minister of New Zealand is very difficult to comprehend,” Sepuloni said. “But as you can imagine, [he’s] very proud.”

Sepuloni has been the country’s social development minister and is of Samoan, Tongan and Pākehā (European) descent. She says she is humbled to be “smashing glass ceilings” and is now tasked with winning back voters for an election campaign that, if successful, would represent the first time New Zealand had voted a Pasifika candidate into one of its top leadership roles.

Click here to read the full article published by The Guardian on 23 January 2023.  

Ardern says she slept soundly ‘for the first time in a long time,’ as colleagues in New Zealand deplore her treatment as PM and race begins to replace her

Jacinda Ardern has said she slept soundly after her shock resignation “for the first time in a long time”, as speculation grows that abuse and threats against the prime minister contributed to her stepping down.

Speaking briefly with reporters outside Hawke’s Bay airport on Friday, Ardern said she was feeling “a range of emotions” and had no regrets about leaving the job.

“I of course feel sad – but also I do have a sense of relief.”

On Thursday, the prime minister said abuse or threats to her and her family had not been a decisive factor in her decision to resign, and that she simply “no longer [had] enough in the tank to do it justice”.

Prominent New Zealand political leaders and public figures, however, say that “constant vilification,” abuse and personal attacks have contributed to that burnout – with some MPs saying the prime minister was “driven from office”, and calling for New Zealand to reexamine its political culture.

Click here to read the full article published by The Guardian on 20 January 2023.

We worry about our families, ourselves, the threats and society’s expectations. When it leads to burnout, can anyone be surprised?

Jacinda Ardern has no gas left in the tank to continue as the prime minister of New Zealand. Her resignation speech was the sort of rare and dignified moment that we have come to expect from her, as a woman who presented the world with the kind of leadership that uniquely leant on her emotional intelligence. I’ll miss her tone and grace. She leaves a legacy she can be proud of.

I have been thinking about what burned the fuel that she relied on to govern.

Firstly I have no doubt that she felt the constant guilt that pretty much every woman in the world feels the moment they evacuate their womb of a child. Even the Mary Poppins-style perfect, Instagram-polished mothers of the world fret that something they do will harm their child in some way. I asked my husband, who has always been our son’s primary carer, if he ever felt guilty for missing a school play or staying late at work. He looked at me baffled; the concept was lost on him. He just thinks, “I had to go to work,” and that’s the beginning and end of that moral maze for him.

Click here to read the full article published by The Guardian on 20 January 2023.

Nominating and electing more female politicians can help to diffuse polarisation and reduce levels of hostility and distrust across party lines, a study shows.

Political parties that elect a greater number of women representatives are viewed more favourably by voters who support opposing parties.

Political polarisation, or animosity towards opposing political parties, takes many forms.

There is growing concern about the link between political polarisation and increases in hostility and distrust across party lines in countries around the world.

Researchers used data on women’s presence in 125 political parties over 20 Western democracies from 1996 to 2017, combined with survey data on how people rated opposing political parties,

Click here to read the full article published by Eureka Alert on 18 January 2023.

Abstract

Concern over partisan resentment and hostility has increased across Western democracies. Despite growing attention to affective polarization, existing research fails to ask whether who serves in office affects mass-level interparty hostility. Drawing on scholarship on women’s behavior as elected representatives and citizens’ beliefs about women politicians, we posit the women MPs affective bonus hypothesis: all else being equal, partisans display warmer affect toward out-parties with higher proportions of women MPs. We evaluate this claim with an original dataset on women’s presence in 125 political parties in 20 Western democracies from 1996 to 2017 combined with survey data on partisans’ affective ratings of political opponents. We show that women’s representation is associated with lower levels of partisan hostility and that both men and women partisans react positively to out-party women MPs. Increasing women’s parliamentary presence could thus mitigate cross-party hostility.

Click here to access the paper.

At a time of pandemics, international economic downturns, and increasing environmental threats due to climate change, countries around the world are facing numerous crises. What impact might we expect these crises to have on the already common perception that executive leadership is a masculine domain? For years, women executives’ ability to lead has been questioned (Jalalzai 2013). However, the outbreak of COVID-19 brought headlines like CNN’s “Women Leaders Are Doing a Disproportionately Great Job at Handling the Pandemic” (Fincher 2020). Do crises offer women presidents and prime ministers opportunities to be perceived as competent leaders? Or do they prime masculinized leadership expectations and reinforce common conceptions that women are unfit to lead? We maintain that people’s perceptions of crisis leadership will depend on whether the crisis creates role (in)congruity between traditional gender norms and the leadership expectations generated by the particular crisis.

Click here to read the article by Cambridge University Press the 12 January 2023.