12 minute read
Opinion: Is female leadership the solution to the pandemic?
12 I People Opinion Is female leadership the solution to the pandemic?
BY MAYA KRAUSE, ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE, 2022 DESIGN BY LILLIE HOFFART, ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE, 2022
Advertisement
On June 8th, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced the country had completely eradicated COVID-19, citing no active cases for the first time since February. This news brought celebration, as public gatherings such as sporting events, retail shopping, and hospitality have reopened. As some countries succeed and others struggle in standing up to the challenges of the pandemic, patterns in leadership will emerge. For instance, countries with female leaders have largely been successful at fighting the coronavirus. Does this pattern demonstrate the skills that women bring to leadership, or is it more representative of what comprises a successful leadership style when faced with a crisis?
Because the coronavirus pandemic is ongoing, no peer-reviewed studies have been conducted that determine any patterns in leadership throughout the pandemic. However, so far, womenled countries have been notably successful in acting quickly and controlling the spread of COVID-19. From Ardern to Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin to Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen, female leaders around the world have been applauded for their swift and successful action in tackling the pandemic. On March 21st, when New Zealand only had 52 cases of COVID-19, Ardern announced a four-level alert system (Prepare, Reduce, Restrict, Lockdown) and had already closed the country’s border. And when New Zealand entered the Lockdown phase a few days later, Ardern addressed the country on Facebook Live in a sweatshirt, apologizing for the abrupt emergency alert announcing the lockdown that had been sent to citizen’s phones with a “loud honk.”
Stereotypes associated with female leaders have typically not been viewed as effective leadership strategies, especially in the United States. According to a study by Dr. Kira Sanbonmatsu at the Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics, women’s gender stereotypes (caring, collaborative, communityoriented) are seen as less fitting for political office than male gender stereotypes (power-seeking, strong, combative). Additionally, as explained to The New York Times by Alice Evans, a sociologist at King’s College London, “there is an expectation that leaders should be aggressive and forward and domineering. But if women demonstrate those traits, then they’re seen as unfeminine.” However, during the pandemic, women leaders around the world have succeeded by leading cautiously, but swiftly, and steering away from the combative responses seen used by some male leaders.
Country South Korea Leader Moon Jae-in COVID-19 case count 14,366
Country New Zealand Leader Jacinda Arden COVID-19 case count 1,215 Country Finland Leader Sanna Marin COVID-19 case count 7,443
It is possible that the pattern of successful female leadership has more to do with leadership style than gender. Many of the countries with the highest rates of coronavirus mortality, such as the United Kingdom, the United States, and Brazil, have authoritarian, populist leaders who have presented themselves as antiestablishment leaders working for the common folk. These leaders have dismissed the advice of public health
professionals surrounding personal protective equipment and banning public gatherings. For example, in the United Kingdom, male Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government initially encouraged residents to continue socializing while later delivering updated lockdown plans that lacked detail and confused citizens. In contrast, Germany’s female Chancellor Angela Merkel has a doctorate in quantum chemistry and worked as a research scientist prior to becoming a politician. Merkel has handled the coronavirus crisis by calling to her strengths as a scientist, presenting residents of Germany with detailed guidelines to halt the spread of COVID-19. Ultimately, the United Kingdom has seen nearly twice the number of cases of COVID-19 per million residents as Germany, and Britain’s lockdown has continued into June while Germany began to reopen shops in May.
The pattern of successful female leaders does have outliers. While Belgium has seen one of the world’s highest mortality rates from COVID-19, female Prime Minister Sophie Wilmes has downplayed the severity of the virus, suggesting that health officials may be over-reporting deaths. Health officials have stated that poor preparation along with a high elderly-home population has led to the devastating death toll. And, in South Korea, male President Moon Jae-in has been praised for his quick response in providing personal protective equipment to medical staff, covering all COVID-19 medical expenses, and implementing extensive contact tracing, identifying those who may have come in contact with someone with COVID-19. South Korea has limited the death toll from COVID-19 to five deaths per million residents, which is significantly lower than the worldwide death toll of 57.2 deaths per million people.
As the pandemic continues, with economies battered, healthcare infrastructure vulnerable, and citizens nervous for the future, the leaders who have succeeded in quelling the damage will emerge. The nations that have been the most successful at tackling the virus thus far have been the leaders that have acted quickly, avoided confusion with clear and consistent responses, and remained sympathetic and understanding to the anxieties of the pandemic. Considering many of the successful leaders so far have been women, the pandemic may affect global perception of the strength of female leadership. Furthermore, the impacts of the world leaders who have succeeded in slowing or stopping the pandemic in their nations could alter the perception of what qualities comprise a good leader.
Data from the World Health Organization, the Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare, and the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control as of Aug. 2, 2020
Country United Kingdom Leader Boris Johnson COVID-19 case count 303,956 Country Germany Leader Angela Merkel COVID-19 case count 209,893
14 I People COVID-19:
An unlikely agent of international sociocultural exposure
drastic difference, in terms of upper-level public
Ahealth responses to COVID-19, is quite apparent when comparing the East to the West. Even when it comes to personal choices and social distancing practices, a similar degree of contrast is observable. Surgical masks are commonplace in public spaces in many East and South Asian countries, while the same safeguards are met with negative responses ranging from resistance to xenophobic remarks in the States. In terms of governmental initiatives, Asia’s public health authorities seem to have taken a much more proactive and involved approach than that of the United States. Not to say that Asia is a monolith — it resembles more of a gradient based on the given political backdrop. Citizens in India and South Korea regularly receive aid in the form of care packages with food, cleaning supplies, and information on how to minimize transmission risk in order to maintain as airtight of a lockdown as possible, while China’s authoritarian management of contact tracing and surveillance saw citizens receive regular temperature checks followed by swift extradition to quarantine centers. Western countries have taken a much more laissez-faire attitude toward drafting and enforcing quarantine regulations, as case numbers continue to climb while lockdown legislation has loosened up.
Why do these extreme variations exist on such a global scale? One explanation comes in the form of a region’s past experience with similar pandemics. The normalization of wearing masks in many Asian countries is due in part to impactful prior experience with droplet-based viruses like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and the same can be said for their comparatively quick and comprehensive pandemic response plans. An additional route of reasoning can be traced back to any given country’s history with air pollution or natural disasters. But even if one were to eliminate this experience factor and take Asian governmental and individual behaviors at face value, whether they be public health-based or otherwise, a common difference can explain certain Eastern and Western behaviors: collectivist versus individualistic thinking. Individualistic cultures like that of the United States place value on independence and self-reliance and generally disprove of the state wielding the majority of governing power, while collectivist cultures like that of many Asian and African nations emphasize the importance of prioritizing the well-being of the group over the self. The degree to which these schools of thought are ingrained in a culture has a profound impact, all the way down to the psychological level.
A social experiment conducted by Toshio Yamagishi and colleagues in 1999 reveals behavioral trends and value systems that remain relevant over 20 years later. In this study, college-aged participants from both Japan and the United States were presented with a scenario involving an
BY SAGE KUMAR, BIOLOGY, 2023 DESIGN BY KRISTI BUI, COMPUTER SCIENCE, 2021 PHOTO BY LUCA SARTONI VIA FLICKR
array of colored pens, which was said to contain one pen of one color and four pens of another color. When asked which pen they would choose, without knowing context about other participants, the Japanese students tended to choose the majority color, while the American participants preferred the rarer color. In a slightly different scenario, when asked which pen they’d choose given that they were the first of five participants to get to choose one, both groups tended to select the majority color. But when told that they were the last of the group to see the pen selection, and that there happened to be five pens remaining, both groups displayed a large preference toward the rarer-colored pen.
The similarity across both groups when it came to the initialselection and final-selection scenarios demonstrates how uniqueness and consideration are valued equally across these cultures. When given the context that they were the first to choose a pen, both American and Japanese subjects tended to be a bit more considerate of their group members who hadn’t gotten to select, and the opposite was true across both groups after they were told that their action would have no effect on any other individuals. These trends helped to debunk prior stereotypes that painted Asia as a continent of conformist attitudes. The fact that when given an non-contextual choice, Japanese participants continued to choose as if they should be concerned with other people’s responses, while Americans saw this scenario without this concern reveals the value that collectivist cultures tend to place on harmony and cooperation, not conformism.
This experiment is one of many that has been used to demonstrate the behavioral differences between those raised in collectivist versus individualistic cultures but is especially relevant when considering the nuanced responses to the coronavirus on a global scale. Given the culturallyinfluenced nature of the choices we make and the actions that authorities take, the contrast between the East and West can be partially explained. The value that collectivism places on group effort and harmony gives relevant context to why masks are the norm and seen as a symbol and a tool of protection and solidarity in big cities of Asia such as Hong Kong, and why the self-sacrifice that comes with social distancing is seen as a duty in Eastern sociocultural practices.
All this is not necessarily meant to demonize individualism nor promote collectivism. Both schools of thought have their pros and cons that manifest themselves in the ups and downs of the cultures and countries they reside in. But when it comes to this pandemic, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to conclude that skewed individualistic thinking could be responsible for generating more harm than good.
The Environment in a covid-19 world
BY BEIYU (PAM) LIN, BIOLOGY, 2021 DESIGN BY SOPHIA HITT, BIOLOGY, 2023
Earth Day went nearly unnoticed this year. Being in the throes of a worldwide pandemic due to COVID-19, people were likely more focused on their glaring lack of social plans in April than on the planet. However, the environmental benefits of quarantine have unexpectedly begun to reveal themselves, making this year’s Earth Day one that should be celebrated rather than forgotten.
COVID-19 during this timespan.”
With people confined to their homes, air pollution worldwide has declined at levels unseen up until this point. As automobile emissions drop because of work-at-home orders and power plants lessen electricity production, record low nitrogen dioxide emissions have been recorded in regions such as the Chesapeake Bay. This decrease is noteworthy because of the harmful environmental effects of nitrogen dioxide, a gaseous air pollutant released from the fuel burned in vehicles and power plants. Nitrogen dioxide has a myriad of environmental consequences, including its reaction with other atmospheric particles to produce acid rain, ability to make air hazy, and contribution of nutrient pollution in coastal waters. In addition, the presence of this gas in the air also irritates human respiratory tracts, which can lead to aggravating respiratory symptoms and even the development of asthma. While nitrogen dioxide itself is not a greenhouse gas, it is an important component of tropospheric ozone, which is a greenhouse gas.
While the benefits of this decrease are certainly visible in the United States, they are even more evident in China, a country notorious for its severe air pollution. China set a roughly one month traffic mobility ban in response to the virus this year, which, according to a study conducted by the Yale School of Public Health, led to a clear improvement in air quality. This order has prevented a roughly estimated 12,000 premature deaths strictly from air pollution, which is approximately three times more premature deaths than those who would have been infected with COVID-19 during this timespan. This trend has shown researchers and healthcare professionals the immense health benefits that could result from more aggressive policy with regard to air pollutants.
Despite the current trends, scientists are skeptical that these numbers will last past the quarantine era. As states begin to lift restrictions, pollution levels are likely to return to their original numbers. These predictions are based on precedent; past instances of a correlation between reduced traffic flow and improved health have been observed in both the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and the 2008 Beijing Olympics, yet these have not been observed to have lasting impacts. However, more research needs to be conducted to have a stronger grasp of the impacts of short-term air quality improvements on long-term pollution health effects. Regardless of past or future research on the topic, the current trends in air quality still provide valuable insight into how monitoring the environment has a direct impact on human health. Looking forward, this will hopefully be a stepping stone for more research and insight into the negative effects of air pollutants.
Health Effects Institute (2008). DOI: 10.1097/01.ede.0000340468.63293.50 Res Rep Health Eff Inst (2010). PMID: 20575278
