I know I’ve started to sound like Jacinda Ardern’s #1 fan at this point, but I wanted to include this excerpt from my paper to highlight that she’s done more for female leaders than conquering COVID in New Zealand.
“I want to be a good leader, not a good lady leader. I don’t want to be known simply as the woman who gave birth.”
Rt. Hon. Jacinda Ardern
PAPER EXCERPT:
On October 26, 2017, Jacinda Ardern became New Zealand’s fortieth Prime Minister — the second-youngest and third to be female in New Zealand and one of the world’s youngest female heads of state. PM Ardern leads the Labour Party, a platform founded on the center-left principles of democratic socialism. Her campaign was based on care and kindness and “she was able to craft her political rhetoric to engage with people’s emotions in a way that ran counter to the exclusionary populist approaches of leaders elsewhere,” influenced by the adversities of her childhood to believe that politics was connected to empathy (Curtin & Greaves, 2020, pp. 180-186).
During her first-term campaign, the media’s focus on Ardern was consistently gender-biased, frequently inquiring about her plans to start a family. And in 2018, PM Ardern became only the second elected world leader to give birth while in office and the first to bring their baby on the floor of a United Nations general assembly (de Jong, 2018).
PM Ardern’s trailblazing leadership did not end with her first term or motherhood. Not only did Ardern win reelection in the 2020 New Zealand general election, but she achieved the most votes for her party since its inception (Hollingsworth, 2020). This victory can be largely attributed to that same platform of care and kindness that got Ardern her first victory. Her commitment to those values has been present in several policy changes during her first term, but her leadership throughout the COVID-19 pandemic has the world’s attention (Menon, 2020). In the following sections, PM Ardern’s leadership will be discussed in comparison to male leadership during the pandemic.
“One of the criticisms I’ve faced over the years is that I’m not aggressive enough or assertive enough, or maybe somehow, because I’m empathetic, it means I’m weak. I totally rebel against that. I refuse to believe that you cannot be both compassionate and strong.“
— Jacinda Ardern
COVID Communication: PM Ardern connected with her citizens via Facebook Live and “the combination of empathetic statements and actions with informal appeals for the community to ‘look after each other’, generates a strong image of social solidarity, where each member of society has a role to play and sacrifice to make” (Williams, 2020).
COVID Policy: Research by Garikipati & Kambhampati (2020) finds that, historically, “women leaders seem to have been significantly more risk averse in the domain of human life, but more risk taking in the domain of the economy” (p. 413). This has been evident through comparisons of male-led versus female-led pandemic decisions. For example, PM Ardern in New Zealand and the Trump Administration in the United States. In the United States, where cases and deaths have consistently been some of the most in the world, the Trump Administration refused to enact nationwide policy for the economy, leaving the decisions about business closures up to individual states. As a result, the inadequate lockdown measures were enough to negatively impact the economy but failed at containing the virus (Parker, 2021).
Pandemic crisis management also challenged the popular argument that female leaders are less decisive than their male counterparts. But as current statistics show, countries with the lowest COVID cases and deaths are also those that acted early and quickly. PM Ardern, as the example, “announced the earliest and toughest self-isolation measures of any country” in New Zealand, exhibiting the swift government action of decisive leadership (Coscieme et al., 2020, p. 15). And the pandemic is not the first time that Ardern was quick to respond with policy initiatives after a crisis. In the aftermath of the Christchurch shootings, Ardern introduced stricter gun policies (Ro, 2021). PM Ardern’s policy actions in these situations support the premise that female leaders are comparably more decisive than male leaders when the indecision threatens human life.
Coscieme, L., Fioramonti, L., Mortensen, L. F., Pickett, K. E., Kubiszewski, I., Lovins, H., Mcglade, J., Ragnarsdóttir, K. V., Roberts, D., Costanza, R., De Vogli, R., & Wilkinson, R. (2020). Women in power: Female leadership and public health outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.13.20152397
Curtin, J., & Greaves, L. (2020). Gender, populism and Jacinda Ardern. A populist exception?: The 2017 New Zealand General Election, 179.
de Jong, E. (2018, September 24). Jacinda Ardern makes history with baby Neve at UN general assembly. The Guardian.
Garikipati, S., & Kambhampati, U. (2021). Leading the Fight against the Pandemic: Does Gender really matter?. Feminist Economics, 27(1-2), 401-418.
Hollingsworth, J. (2020, October 17). A look at Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s profile. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/17/asia/new-zealand-election-2020-results-intl-hnk/index.html
Menon, P. (2020a, October 16). New Zealand’s Ardern wins “historic” re-election for crushing COVID-19. U.S. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-newzealand-election/new-zealands-ardern-wins-historic-re-election-for-crushing-covid-19-idUSKBN2712ZI
Parker, R. W. (2021). Why America’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic Failed: Lessons from New Zealand’s Success. Administrative Law Review, 73, 77-77.
Ro, C. (2021). Why do we still distrust women leaders? Bbc.com. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210108-why-do-we-still-distrust-women-leaders
Williams, K. (2020, August 13). Coronavirus: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s Facebook Live use gets thumbs up in British study. Stuff. https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/122445029/coronavirus-prime-minister-jacinda-arderns-facebook-live-use-gets-thumbs-up-in-british-study
MAIGC Summer Engagement Abroad Module 