with her head superimposed on a different female body, legs akimbo and a hole where the crotch should be. Affixed to cars with the hole aligned to the petrol cap, they created the illusion that motorists filling their tanks were penetrating Dilma.
After her downfall, her critics waved signs that read ‘Tchau Querida’ – ‘Goodbye, Dear’. The price to Brazil certainly was. The charges against Dilma never included lining her own pockets; investigators alleged she had turned a blind eye to kickbacks at Petrobras and had disguised budget deficits. The same investigation suspected substantial bribe-taking among some of the politicians who engineered her expulsion.
Brazil’s legislature is 90 per cent male; around half of these men have themselves been indicted on corruption charges.6 One hundred per cent of the Cabinet assembled by Dilma’s white, male replacement, Michael Temer – himself accused of accepting bribes and of misuse of electoral funds – was white, a striking move in a country shaped by the diversity of its population. Brazil’s black and mixed-race nationals are in the majority, and also make up a lion’s share of the country’s poor. Temer’s Cabinet boasted another distinction: it was the first since 1979 not to include a single woman. ‘We tried to seek women but for reasons that we don’t need to bring up here, we discussed it and it was not possible,’ said Temer’s Chief of Staff, Eliseu Padilha.7 The new government quickly set about dismantling programmes designed to narrow Brazil’s overlapping wealth, race and gender gaps.
Some women manage to hold on, although holding on isn’t, of itself, a good thing. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became Africa’s first female head of state when she triumphed in Liberia’s 2005 elections, two years after the end of a bloody civil war that killed more than 250,000 people and displaced nearly a third of the country’s population. She has declared she will not contest the presidential poll planned for October 2017. ‘Our people would not take it. And my age wouldn’t allow it. So that’s out of the question,’ she said.
Her decision – provided she remains true to it – distinguishes Johnson Sirleaf from a raft of male African leaders who cling to power long after any democratic mandate ebbs. The international community has already garlanded her with praise. In 2011 Johnson Sirleaf accepted a Nobel Peace Prize along with two other women, Leymah Gbowee, a fellow Liberian, also praised for helping to heal the country’s rifts, and a Yemeni human rights activist, Tawakkul Karman. A year later, Gbowee resigned as head of Liberia’s Peace and Reconciliation Commission, attacking Johnson Sirleaf ’s efforts to tackle poverty and criticising a record of nepotism that had seen three of the President’s sons take up senior positions at, respectively, Liberia’s state oil company, its National Security Agency and its Central Bank.8
Johnson Sirleaf may not after all represent quite the model of African leadership that the wealthy democracies of Europe and North America hope to see, but at least a few of the flaws of her leadership are rooted in the continent’s history of exploitation by some of those same countries. Liberia, founded by freed slaves, free-born black Americans and Afro-Caribbean émigrés, is the only African country never to have officially been a colony. (Ethiopia was briefly annexed by Italy in 1936.) What Liberia did not escape was Western imperialism. In 1926 the US tire and rubber company Firestone leased one million Liberian acres for 99 years at the annual rate of six cents per acre, inserting a clause that gave the corporation rights over any gold, diamonds, or other minerals discovered on the land, and also tying Liberia to a loan at punitive rates.
Africa’s oldest democracy, Botswana, has been holding elections only since 1966. Africa’s newest country, South Sudan, came into being in 2011. Colonisation – the patriarchal rule of the White Master – and the struggles for liberation that speeded its end continue to make their mark. Borders drawn with no respect to tribal claims, local history or practicalities exacerbate conflicts and encourage a tendency, reinforced by those conflicts, to try to consolidate power, whether along tribal or party lines or among families. With power comes wealth. ‘Politics is the avenue to the most fantastic wealth and so of course it’s been very competitive and the men want that space,’ says Ayisha Osori, a prominent journalist, lawyer and women’s rights advocate, who stood in the 2014 primary elections for Nigeria’s House of Representatives. ‘They want to keep that space for themselves and so women have to be equally as ruthless and as determined as the men.’9
The tangles of post-imperialism play out in the country Johnson Sirleaf governs and the ways in which she governs it, but her record also illustrates the point that Osori makes and that enthusiasts for increased female representation sometimes gloss over: female leadership isn’t necessarily free from the imperfections of the male variety.
The performance in office of another Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, reinforces that lesson. She would be Myanmar’s President if the military junta that kept her under house arrest for 15 years had not also drafted a constitution that excludes her from the highest office. Instead, Suu Kyi has become the nation’s leader in all but name, holding a dual role as State Counsellor and Minister of Foreign Affairs. An icon of peaceful resistance, her lustre is dimming as she fails to use her power to grant rights or recognition to the Rohingya, Myanmar’s marginalised Muslim population, or to curb human rights abuses by the army as it seeks to stem independence movements. When 50-foot women disappoint, they do so in a big way because our expectations of them are higher.
One name always crops up in discussions about what women bring to politics: Margaret Thatcher. Love her or loathe her – and the middle ground I occupy is noticeably underpopulated – she was one of the most successful politicians of the twentieth century. She won three successive general elections and left a party that, after ejecting her as leader for fear of electoral defeat, went on to win one more. She galvanised the UK and its moribund economy, at a cost that explains the enduring anger she still evokes, levied on traditional industry and every Briton on the sharp end of the history she was making. She speeded the end of the Cold War, recognising in Mikhail Gorbachev a different kind of Soviet leader. ‘I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together,’ she said. They did.
She showcased female potential. Yet her ghost is most often summoned to demonstrate that female leaders do not invariably promote female interests. ‘I owe nothing to women’s lib,’ she insisted, and during 11 years in office she made sure that women’s lib owed little directly to her. She rejected the idea that government should help mothers to return to work, telling the BBC she did not want Britain turned into ‘a crèche society’. She appointed only one woman to any of her Cabinets. Baroness Young held a minor portfolio as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster for two years, and came to the role with a sniggering nickname that spoke to the disquiet of men in Westminster and the media at seeing women rise: ‘Old Tin Knickers’.
Young’s boss inspired a more respectful variation on this theme, but one reflecting a similar unease about female power. ‘The Iron Lady’ lived up to the soubriquet, tempered to a steely obstinacy by years of fighting her way into rooms full of patronising, posh men, and then presiding at conference tables with more of the same. An essay by academic Rosabeth Moss Kanter, published in 1977, two years before Thatcher first entered Downing Street, foreshadowed Thatcher’s leadership style. Kanter, now a professor at Harvard Business School, observed that ‘tokens’, members of minority groups in organisations, are made to feel uncomfortable about their differences and so try to conform. That might mean acting like the majority, or fitting in with the majority’s expectations of minority behaviour. Such behavioural distortions only stop when minorities reach a critical mass.10 Subsequent studies suggested that mass is reached at 30 per cent and above, but more recent research points to a greater complexity in the number and habits of minority behaviour.
What is clear is that token women frequently try to fit in by behaving like men – or, in Thatcher’s case, by out-manning the men. A computer analysis of Hillary Clinton’s interview and speech transcripts discovered that her language became more masculine – a parameter defined by linguistics experts – as she moved from being First Lady and up the ranks of electoral politics.11
