Why are women in power harder than men?

By Gwynne Dyer

Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you tonight in my red chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up, my fair hair gently waved...the Iron Lady of the Western World.

-- Margaret Thatcher, London, 1976

LONDON (JP): Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Tansu Ciller, even Indira Gandhi... Why are so many women who win power at the national level spectacularly hard and uncompromising? You can be banished from polite society these days for suggesting that the female is deadlier than the male, but in politics it is the plain truth.

Take Jenny Shipley, soon to become New Zealand's first woman prime minister. The coup in which she ousted Prime Minister Jim Bolger as leader of the ruling National Party was a classic act of political treachery: she collected signatures of support while Bolger was away in Scotland at the Commonwealth conference, and bluntly told him he was finished when he came home. She even looked like she enjoyed doing it.

"Jenny can tell you in wonderful warm tones how she's going to garrote you and disembowel you and throw your intestines over her left shoulder," remarked Michael Laws, a member of parliament for the New Zealand First Party, the smaller partner in the governing coalition. "Frankly, if I wanted somebody to bring a human face to the Spanish Inquisition, I would choose Jenny."

Even after you've made the necessary allowances for jealousy and anti-female prejudice among her colleagues, there is still something flinty and dogmatic beyond the political norm in Jenny Shipley's behavior. Deliberately so, one suspects.

When she was Social Welfare Minister in an earlier National Party government in 1990, she cut benefits in New Zealand's once lavish welfare system by up to 25 percent. She was burned in effigy in the streets for that, but gloried in the notoriety. She went on to become Health Minister in 1993, and immediately did the same slash-and-burn job there.

Most recently, as Minister of Transport and Women's Affairs, she even tried to force farmers to pay for the upkeep of rural roads themselves through a toll system. She was not just "the toughest man in the Cabinet", as someone memorably observed about Margaret Thatcher. Like Thatcher, she positively reveled in that role, and deliberately adopted it as her public image.

It worked brilliantly. As soon as Jim Bolger has filled a couple of outstanding commitments, Jenny Shipley will replace him as party leader and prime minister. She will be the first woman ever to govern the country that, a century ago, was the first to give women the vote. And she is so tough that she eats babies for breakfast.

Why do so many of the women who succeed in winning and wielding power at the national level play the 'hard man'? The total numbers are too small to make good statistics, but they certainly suggest that politics at the more exalted levels positively encourages the rise of women whose public persona has all the warmth and charm of a contract killer.

Even at the very top, many women politicians do not present this image, but a startlingly large number do. And since these are intelligent people who are professionals in the image game, one presumes that they see some advantage in doing so.

This is not to suggest that people like Margaret Thatcher and Jenny Shipley, beneath their tough exteriors, are really sweet and simple women. It is just to give them credit for being intelligent human beings, masters of their craft, who would hide their toughness if it paid politically to do so. Plainly, it does not.

But what possible advantage could there be in being seen as a tough, unfeeling, ruthless pit-bull of a politician?

Very little, if you happen to be a male politician in a country at peace. But if you are a senior female politician with ambitions to climb to the very top of the greasy pole, then toughness may be an essential part of your credibility, proof that you are not just a 'typical' woman, all woolly warmth and sympathy.

There are many exceptions to this rule, of course. Over half the women who have made it to the rank of national leader in democratic countries did not do so entirely under their own steam.

They were either compromise candidates who were briefly put into office to take the blame for a worn-out government -- Canada's former prime minister Kim Campbell and France's Edith Cresson both fit that paradigm -- or else their power is essentially hereditary.

At first glance, for example, it seems odd that all four major countries of South Asia have elected one or several women leaders, while none of the four biggest industrialized countries have. Are Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans that much more sophisticated than Americans, Russians, Japanese and Germans?

Not at all. The Indian subcontinent has a unique record in terms of electing women leaders precisely because it consists of countries that have spent fifty years trying to be democratic (with varying success) without the normal infrastructure of a developed economy and all-pervasive mass media. So the voters sought and found families, political dynasties, to give their loyalties to -- and members of those dynasties could get elected regardless of sex.

In the biggest industrialized democracies, by contrast, it is virtually impossible for a woman to get elected president or prime minister. (Americans might manage it one of these days, but I wouldn't hold my breath.)

And in middle and smaller industrialized countries, many of which have had one woman leader by now, the price of power is still very often that the woman prove herself to be more 'masculine' than her male rivals. While the Tony Blairs and Bill Clintons can be as caring and vulnerable as they like.