Female leaders handled Covid better
I recently wrote about how Covid exposes bad leadership and bad governance, in my view. Interestingly, the one thing that I got criticized for in that article by a reader was that it was ‘anti-male’ (I paraphrase). In the article, I wrote:
“It is no surprise to me that governments led by female politicians tend to do better in such situations”.
When I wrote that sentence, I thought it was so obvious, looking at the contrasting picture of Germany, New Zealand, and Taiwan on the one hand and the UK, the United States and Brazil on the other, that I didn’t even bother checking the empirical evidence.
Luckily, two researchers from the University of Reading did the work for me and looked at the Covid pandemic in 194 countries, 19 of which are led by women. Because so few countries are led by women it is difficult to do a traditional statistical analysis of the impact of female leadership on the outcome of the pandemic. Instead, what the researchers did was to take the 19 countries with female leaders and identified three countries that are as similar as possible to these countries (looking at population, developmental status, healthcare system, etc.) but had male heads of government. Then they looked at the differences in outcomes between female-led countries and male-led countries.
On average, female-led countries had c. 15,000 to 20,000 fewer Covid cases and c. 1,600 fewer Covid deaths than similar countries run by men. They also excluded some prominent cases like the United States, Germany, and New Zealand and ran the analysis again. And again, they found that countries run by female leaders had statistically significantly fewer cases and fewer deaths.
The research also showed that the main reason for the discrepancy in cases and deaths was that female leaders chose to shut down countries a little bit earlier than men. At the time lockdown was introduced, countries led by female leaders had c. 300 fewer Covid cases and c. 25 fewer Covid deaths on average. That is a small difference, but in a pandemic that grows exponentially, this small difference eventually leads to large differences in infections and deaths.
And this brings me back to the issue of governance. Faced with a trade-off between keeping the economy open and saving lives, male leaders too often prioritised the economy over the well-being of the people. And by doing so, they chose short-term gain over the risk of bigger losses in the long term. While that might have been turned out well, in the case of Covid-19, it was the wrong choice. The short-term gain from keeping the economy open for a week longer or from refraining from more aggressive lockdown measures has been overshadowed by the massive cost when lockdowns eventually had to be introduced anyway.
Furthermore, with more Covid cases and more deaths, it is clear that the long-term costs to these countries are going to be bigger than for countries that chose to protect its citizens’ lives. The reason is a simple as it is cynical: dead people don’t add to GDP. Dead people don’t go to work and don’t earn wages. Dead people don’t pay taxes (though their estates do but that is another topic) and dead people don’t consume too much. By protecting lives, female leaders not only lessened the burden on their health care systems but prioritised long-term benefits over short-term benefits. And this is what good governance is all about, getting the best trade-off between conflicting goals. The literature on board diversity shows that more diverse boards are better at weighing conflicting goals against each other and thus companies with more diverse leadership tend to do better in the long run (though not necessarily in the short run). And similarly, countries with more diverse leadership tend to do better in the long run than countries run by a clique of people with very similar backgrounds and views. Complex organisations, be it countries of businesses need a diverse group of leaders and open dissent within the leadership. Otherwise, groupthink[1] sets in and that can lead to catastrophic outcomes as the Covid pandemic has shown.
[1] Note that the groupthink problem in governments was first formalized in the Kennedy administration. The disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in Kennedy’s first year in office was based on a tendency for groupthink within the administration. After that disaster, the Kennedy administration took active steps to prevent groupthink which helped save the world from a nuclear catastrophe a little later during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The knowledge that one needs diversity in a government has helped save the world sixty years ago. It would be good if we could re-learn this lesson in 2020.