Why women should rule the world

[SapphosRock]

Interesting article showing the positive response from female leaders to the Coronavirus pandemic. They are literally saving lives while the men (particularly Trump) are in denial and floundering:

[[https://www.forbes.com/sites/avivahwittenbergcox/2020/04/13/what-do-countries-with-the-best-coronavirus-reponses-have-in-common-women-leaders/
www.forbes.com/sites/avivahwittenbergcox/2020/04/13/what-do-countries-with-the-best-coronavirus-reponses-have-in-common-women-leaders/]]

I totally agree that Trump is an outlier and probably shouldn't be used as a data point in this sort of comparison..

ByGrabtharsHammerWhatASavings (incidentally, Galaxy Quest is one of my favourite parodies, I love how Rickman delivers that line)

I believe there are genetic differences between men and women in terms of intellectual compositions (amongst others) but I agree that these are also strongly affected by society.

That said, I don't believe the either has any impact on women as national leaders, since there's always going to be sufficient outliers to fill a given cabinet that reflects the will of the people. I also believe that a nation which strove to have a purely female government would suffer just as badly as a nation which strove to have a purely male (or purely white, ect.) government, albeit in different ways, because elevating leaders based on inherent traits absolves them of responsibility for poor performance and narrows down the choices for leaders without just cause. I also agree with the points made by NonnyMouse1337.

Is diversity always a strength though? Should anti-vaxxers have as much say on the rolling out of a covid-19 vaccine, even to the point of delaying it and condemning many thousands to death?

There are different kinds of diversity. In general it's a strength to have some different kinds of experiences, types of expertise, different ways of thinking about problems.

Guardian by Robin Dembroff
'In this moment of crisis, macho leaders are a weakness, not a strength
Trump and Bolsonaro have been a liability in the face of coronavirus. We need leaders with a different emotional skillset'

Concludes:
"The current pandemic throws into stark relief how useful the concept of toxic masculinity can be. Dr Roger Kirby, a men’s health expert, observes that toxic forms of masculinity, which lead to “dominant, aggressive, [and] risk-taking” behaviour, cause men to see illness or other health problems as effeminate and weak, leading them to choose risk and discomfort over the “emasculation” of seeking medical treatment. As a result, men who pursue these forms of masculinity display “the strongest predictors of individual risk behaviour over the life course”.

Trump and Bolsonaro are clear examples of men who cling to toxic forms of masculinity. They lash out at anything that threatens their dominance, and rely on misogyny and violence to bolster their egos. They denigrate women and femininity in order to reinforce their fragile sense of their manhood, referring to women as “slut[s]”, “dog[s]” and “piece[s] of ass”. Trump has boasted about his penis size and testosterone levels, and Bolsonaro said that he would rather have a dead son than a gay one. Both frequently encourage or excuse violence, and rage at those who disagree or make fun of them. They are two peas in a pod. And in our current crisis, their toxic masculinity is a deathly threat. It plays out in the most literal sense: it risks physical harm to others and themselves.

True to this prediction, Trump recently made headlines for initially refusing to take a test for Covid-19, obey physical distancing guidelines or wear a face mask, undermining his own health experts’ recommendations. Bolsonaro, following suit, declared that his manly history “as an athlete” would protect him from the virus. And while it is tempting to laugh at the absurdity of Bolsonaro’s claim, the sobering reality is that Trump and Bolsonaro’s behaviour has an ever-rising body count.

Now that this lie is no longer sustainable, Trump and Bolsonaro have pivoted. Both currently attempt to cast themselves as hyper-masculine “wartime” heroes, committed to protecting their countries from a “hidden enemy”. One form of muscular egoism replaces another"
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/13/leaders-trump-bolsonaro-coroanvirus-toxic-masculinity

because of some kind of personality quirk

It has been theorised that the proportion of sociopaths/psychopaths in positions of influence (corporate or government) is higher than the percentage of psychopaths in the population as a whole (1/100 - which is actually quite a lot when you think about it). They can be very charming, persuasive, ruthless, manipulative and they love to win. A useful constellation of characteristics for someone who wants to get ahead. I imagine it makes them quite effective at influencing and leading others although god knows in what direction. They can be male or female but add the male increased propensity to violence and aggression to that heady mix and you've got a bigger problem. A lot of the misery in the world may actually be caused by a handful of psychopaths who get to the top.

I think it would be very interesting to brain scan people and find out who the psychopaths are - the technology is there. As eye tests rule out people from certain jobs, perhaps there should be brain scan screening for candidates for certain positions of power. Yes I know it's not very human rightsy, but neither are they.

Excluding Trump from current analysis seems quite arbitrary, he isn't any kind of outlier of male national leadership models either current or in recent history.

On what basis would. Theresa May have been better? I think she was a terrible Prime Minister (Brexit??)

Clearly Trump.and Johnson are awful but then Leo Varadker seems to be doing a great job. I also think Obama would have handled things much better.

Clearly there are some terrible female leaders and some great male ones, but as a generalisation it is rare to find a female leader who is basically incompetent and doesn't take the job seriously. Not so with men.

It's not just government, look at any big company and the Board of Directors will usually be dominated by privileged white men of very average intelligence. Women have always had to prove themselves so much more and need to be exceptional to reach the same level.

I think it would be very interesting to brain scan people and find out who the psychopaths are - the technology is there. As eye tests rule out people from certain jobs, perhaps there should be brain scan screening for candidates for certain positions of power. Yes I know it's not very human rightsy, but neither are they.

Being a psychopath doesn't automatically mean the individual wants to do bad things to others. They also tend to perform rather logically in high stress situations. I also think it's worth considering the long term effects of a rule like this in a society where the legal system operates on precedents. You'd be empowering the government to prevent competition from people they deem mentally ineligible.

Well not every one liked it when Maggies was pm, and I am disappointed with Burma leader. But then there are plenty of rubbish male leaders. In short it,s not to do with gender.

There's a difference between having psychopathic traits, and being a full-blown psychopath. The latter tend to be highly manipulative game-players and risk-takers, motivated by the egoistic reward of power over others. While the harm to others may come about as collateral damage, the harm still happens because they literally don't care about whether they hurt other people or not.

Excluding Trump from current analysis seems quite arbitrary, he isn't any kind of outlier of male national leadership models either current or in recent history.

Isn't an outlier???
Have you seen his daily briefings?

Can you be more specific, deydo?

I am of the opinion that if women were the sole decision makers in human affairs, there would be no war or famine in the world today.

It is men that constantly feel the need to organise military conflicts all over the world and it is men who lack the empathy required to give to those less fortunate than themselves. If it were up to me there would never be a single male in a position of authority again. They have had the turna and buggered the planet up good and proper.

Trump is where the Republican Party has been going since 1980.
He is not an outlier. He is a malignant narcissist just like Putin, Bolsonaro, Lukashenko, and on and on.

Can you be more specific, deydo?

His leadership style, patterns of speech, logic, everything about him is unlike anything I've ever seen before in any world leader.
A lot of people are saying he seems like he has dementia.
It's astounding to watch him talk, I don't think he's any kind of normal.
I'm not sure how anyone can say he isn't an outlier.

Tony Schwarz who ghost wrote "The Art of the Deal" about/for Trump in 1987 spoke out about the experience & his insights into Trump's patterns of behaviour:

New Yorker July 25 2016

(extract)
“Trump has been written about a thousand ways from Sunday, but this fundamental aspect of who he is doesn’t seem to be fully understood,” Schwartz told me. “It’s implicit in a lot of what people write, but it’s never explicit—or, at least, I haven’t seen it. And that is that it’s impossible to keep him focussed on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes, and even then . . . ” Schwartz trailed off, shaking his head in amazement. He regards Trump’s inability to concentrate as alarming in a Presidential candidate. “If he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it’s impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time,” he said.

In a recent phone interview, Trump told me that, to the contrary, he has the skill that matters most in a crisis: the ability to forge compromises. The reason he touted “The Art of the Deal” in his announcement, he explained, was that he believes that recent Presidents have lacked his toughness and finesse: “Look at the trade deficit with China. Look at the Iran deal. I’ve made a fortune by making deals. I do that. I do that well. That’s what I do.”

But Schwartz believes that Trump’s short attention span has left him with “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance.” He said, “That’s why he so prefers TV as his first news source—information comes in easily digestible sound bites.” He added, “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.” During the eighteen months that he observed Trump, Schwartz said, he never saw a book on Trump’s desk, or elsewhere in his office, or in his apartment."

This year, Schwartz has heard some argue that there must be a more thoughtful and nuanced version of Donald Trump that he is keeping in reserve for after the campaign. “There isn’t,” Schwartz insists. “There is no private Trump.” This is not a matter of hindsight. While working on “The Art of the Deal,” Schwartz kept a journal in which he expressed his amazement at Trump’s personality, writing that Trump seemed driven entirely by a need for public attention. “All he is is ‘stomp, stomp, stomp’—recognition from outside, bigger, more, a whole series of things that go nowhere in particular,” he observed, on October 21, 1986. But, as he noted in the journal a few days later, “the book will be far more successful if Trump is a sympathetic character—even weirdly sympathetic—than if he is just hateful or, worse yet, a one-dimensional blowhard.”

Schwartz says of Trump, “He lied strategically. He had a complete lack of conscience about it.” Since most people are “constrained by the truth,” Trump’s indifference to it “gave him a strange advantage.”

When challenged about the facts, Schwartz says, Trump would often double down, repeat himself, and grow belligerent. "

concludes:
As for Trump’s anger toward him, he said, “I don’t take it personally, because the truth is he didn’t mean it personally. People are dispensable and disposable in Trump’s world.” If Trump is elected President, he warned, “the millions of people who voted for him and believe that he represents their interests will learn what anyone who deals closely with him already knows—that he couldn’t care less about them.”
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all

Guardian June 24th 2019 by Max Hastings:

I was Boris Johnson’s boss: he is utterly unfit to be prime minister
The Tory party is about to foist a tasteless joke upon the British people. He cares for nothing but his own fame and gratification
(extract)
I have known Johnson since the 1980s, when I edited the Daily Telegraph and he was our flamboyant Brussels correspondent. I have argued for a decade that, while he is a brilliant entertainer who made a popular maître d’ for London as its mayor, he is unfit for national office, because it seems he cares for no interest save his own fame and gratification.

Tory MPs have launched this country upon an experiment in celebrity government, matching that taking place in Ukraine and the US, and it is unlikely to be derailed by the latest headlines. The Washington Post columnist George Will observes that Donald Trump does what his political base wants “by breaking all the china”. We can’t predict what a Johnson government will do, because its prospective leader has not got around to thinking about this. But his premiership will almost certainly reveal a contempt for rules, precedent, order and stability.

Dignity still matters in public office, and Johnson will never have it. Yet his graver vice is cowardice, reflected in a willingness to tell any audience, whatever he thinks most likely to please, heedless of the inevitability of its contradiction an hour later.

Like many showy personalities, he is of weak character. I recently suggested to a radio audience that he supposes himself to be Winston Churchill, while in reality being closer to Alan Partridge. Churchill, for all his wit, was a profoundly serious human being. Far from perceiving anything glorious about standing alone in 1940, he knew that all difficult issues must be addressed with allies and partners.

Churchill’s self-obsession was tempered by a huge compassion for humanity, or at least white humanity, which Johnson confines to himself. He has long been considered a bully, prone to making cheap threats

Johnson would not recognise truth, whether about his private or political life, if confronted by it in an identity parade. In a commonplace book the other day, I came across an observation made in 1750 by a contemporary savant, Bishop Berkeley: “It is impossible that a man who is false to his friends and neighbours should be true to the public.” Almost the only people who think Johnson a nice guy are those who do not know him." (continues)
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/24/boris-johnson-prime-minister-tory-party-britain

a female leader who is basically incompetent and doesn't take the job seriously.

I can think of three. All Argentinian. Two called Mrs Peron.

I wonder if a background in science is a better predictor of pandemic response than sex.

Merkel studied physics and worked as a research scientist, and Varadkar (as noted above) was a doctor.

I can think of three. All Argentinian. Two called Mrs Peron.

I was thinking of them, Dilma Rousseff and probably Aung San Suu Kyi.
But yes, rare.

I wonder if a background in science is a better predictor of pandemic response than sex.

Or maybe just a willingness to listen to scientific advisors.
Trump says he "doesn't have any proof" but that he "just has a feeling" that the virus will "miraculously disappear".

I wonder if a background in science is a better predictor of pandemic response than sex.

I can't prove this, of course, but seeing something similar in my corporate environment every day: I strongly suspect what may actually be at play here is simply good old-fashioned sexism, leading to selection bias.

It's not unusual in my line of work for the female leaders, on average, to be miles agead of the male ones. But then, that is because becoming a female leader, despite all the diversity champions, special events and newsletters, is still just simply very difficult. If you're not in the top 2-5%, you simply won't be in this position, which is much more accessible to mediocre men than mediocre women.

Not the most uplifting thought, but I'd be utterly surprised if the contrary could be conclusively demonstrated.

Blimey yes, Aung San Suu Kyi. Truly worthy of her Nobel Prize alongside Kissinger and Begin.

And for outright evil scum, I nominate Aasma Al-Assad formerly of Acton.