Margaret Thatcher, Indira Ghandi, Chandrika Kumaratunga, Golda Meir, Eva Peron, Corazon Aquino, Angela Merkel and Benazir Bhutto are all members of an elite club.
They all held the highest elected position in their respective countries – United Kingdom, India, Sri Lanka, Israel, Argentina, the Philippines, Germany and Pakistan.
This month this exclusive club welcomed two more members; Michele Bachelet in Chile and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia.
On Jan. 15, Bachelet won the seat of Chilean presidenct in the second round of voting, with 53 percent of the vote. Bachelet, 54, is the candidate from the left-leaning party that has governed Chile since Gen. Agosto Pinochet stepped down. She is a single mother who has little formal political background.
Bachelet is a trained physician who spent many years working at an under financed clinic in Santiago, served as defense minister under outgoing President Ricardo Lagos. However, she arguably has had more than her share of informal training.
Her father was assassinated by Pinochet and Bachelet was imprisoned in Villa Girmaldi, a torture camp, during the same time and spent years of her life in exile.
On the other side of the globe, Sirleaf was sworn in on Jan. 16 as the new president of Liberia. She is the first woman elected to lead a country on the African continent. She is a Harvard-trained banker and vows to make a break with the past. Liberia is recovering from a 14-year-long civil war. Sirleaf was active in opposition politics and has been imprisoned for her views.
At this point in time almost every continent has had a female leader, every continent that is, except for North America.
In fact in the United States, in a country of 300 million people, where the male to female ratio is practically 50-50, only 15 percent of the legislators are female. This lack of representation is alarming for a number of reasons. The first being, that obviously men and women thing differently about many things and have different perspectives on life and goverance.
So why wouldn’t we want that kind of diversity in the House of Representatives and in the Senate? Wouldn’t it be refreshing to have greater input by female legislators on such important issues as taxes, health care, military spending, Social Security and school funding?
Yet when someone suggests that a woman could be president of the United States, most people scoff. Whether Hillary Clinton runs in 2008 only time will tell. And even if she is the Democratic presidential candidate, women voters should not vote for her solely because of her gender.
But eventually the United States will have a woman president. And if we don’t, all of us should at least want a greater number of women elected to office as legislators.
Without this forward progression the United States will not be able to retain its position as a world innovator.
