Women in Power, by Faith Kamau

A Collaboration with Faith Kamau. Nairobi, Kenya

Title: Women in Power

Author: Faith Kamau

Growing up in Nairobi, my dad loved watching international news channels. At the ripe old age of three, I was reasonably put out and thus began my first hate watch: Richard Quest on CNN. I was too young to understand why the goings on of the rest of the world mattered to my accountant father and to be honest sometimes I still don’t but watching international news outlets did bring me one piece of clarity. It introduced me to women in power.

Imagine you’re 5 years old and the only other source of entertainment available to you except for your toys is the telly but the telly is always full of grumpy old men in dark suits looking important and saying all these big words that go right over your head. Somehow there are always men on the telly but very few women. It starts to bother your little five year old brain until you latch on to Angela Merkel, the former German Chancellor.

I of course didn’t know who Angela was at five years of age but I was instantly transfixed. Who was this lone woman in all the important news broadcasts and pictures? The kind that they would air on National news channels as well when something big was happening in Europe. Whoever she was, I wanted to be just like her when I grew up.

Unfortunately, for five year old me, I am sad to report that twenty odd years later, we are still not German citizens and I don’t think they’d allow foreigners to run for or hold public office. But some things did change in those twenty odd years, more women started popping up in those news broadcasts. More and more women got elected into leadership and I, their loyal viewer, also grew up and came to the realisation we’re not doing enough.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations’ Women’s Power Index only 26 out of 193 countries currently have a female head of state and as you examine cabinets in these countries, the disparity only grows. The verdict: even though there has been an increase in the number of women in power, that increase is still incomparable to that of their male counterparts. And now, with the rise of fascist leaning politics around the world, what little growth we had is now stalling.

2024 was a landmark election year globally with 74 countries going to the ballot and of all of those countries voting, only 3 elected a female candidate. Of the 13 UN member states currently being led by a woman, 9 of them are the first women ever elected into office. What’s worse, only 60 out of the 193 UN member states have ever had a woman as their head of state. For a group of people who make up 51% of the global population, why haven’t women had equal opportunity to lead their countries?

For most voters, women are still viewed as incompetent leaders incapable of handling the requirements of the job of head of state. The reasons for that are mostly sexist, but you also wouldn't be wrong if you pointed out that many of them don't run for public office to begin with. Take the 2024 US presidential election, only four women sought out nominations for presidency and only one woman was successful, Kamala Harris. And despite all that she still wasn't able to clinch victory from Donald Trump.

Far too often, women tend to either take themselves out of the running by almost never seeking office, or face systemic barriers that hold them back in spite of their desire to run for office. From lack of support within their political parties of choice to being unable to raise the money necessary to register themselves as candidates in some countries, women's desires for leadership are constantly cut off before they have the chance to take off. Far too often, when women finally attain candidacy, it's usually to find themselves running against strong candidates who they stand little chance against as was revealed by researchers at the university of Edinburgh. They revealed that female members of the Conservative party in the UK more often ran for historically hard to win seats as compared to their male counterparts. A symptom of the “Glass Cliff” theory.

Glass Cliff theory claims that women are more likely to break through the glass ceiling in troubled times. Businesses are more likely to employ female and by extension other minority leadership in times of crisis. As such women in these positions are set up for failure from the outset. For most of the women the study focused on, with the benefit of hindsight, you can see that they had been handed impossible situations and very short timeframes to enact change.

So, are women actually bad at the job? Is that why it's so difficult to get a woman into public office? Yes and no. I know, that's not exactly a ringing endorsement after my speech up there but I believe it's important to be circumspect about women in power and that requires some honesty. Women, just like men, are susceptible to falling prey to abuse of power. We've seen it in Bangladesh and more recently in Tanzania and these won't be the last instances of abuse of power from any political leader, man or woman.

As long as we're unable to view both male and female candidates without a gender bias, female candidates will always be competing in a race with far much higher stakes. Questions about her choice of clothing, her running for office while unmarried or deciding to have a child while in office are things a female candidate's male counterparts never have to contend with. Part of the problem has always been how female candidates are packaged to us by the media. Women are more sensitive to media criticism and if they seem impervious to it, they are often perceived as difficult which then hurts their chances at being elected.

Women are constantly in a: damned if they do, damned if they don't cage when it comes to leadership but hiding away is far from the solution. Part of the conclusions of Glass Cliff theory show that once people have warmed up to the idea of women in leadership, some of the biases exhibited early on in the study simply cease to factor into decision making. The solution is to simply keep fighting for women's candidacy. Whether that is by demanding there be quotas for female representation in government or holding the media accountable when they take on sexist criticisms against women candidates; the face of democracy needs to represent more than just men in power.

There's a young girl who watched New Zealand's Jacinda Ardern's prime ministership in awe, another who hated to see former US vice president Kamala Harris lose and countless others who stood up to Bangladesh's Sheikh Hasina. I grew up wanting to see women in power, with my vote, I can make that happen and so can you. You know a woman who could do a lot of good if only she put herself out there? Now's the time to get her campaign rolling. And if you're reading this and wondering who would come out to vote if you ran? Well, I would. And countless others. The Glass Cliff only exists if we let it; so don't.

A Collaboration with Faith Kamau. Nairobi, Kenya

Title: Women in Power

Author: Faith Kamau

Women in Power, by Faith Kamau