Left On Top: Women World Leaders & Political Ideologies

Abstract

In the past 10 years, women have significantly increased representation in many sectors of the working field [ 1 ]. Yet, one field in specific, the political field, continues to show an overwhelming lack of female representation. Whereas women are exponentially showing interest in political leadership positions, the percentage of women who hold these positions have only slightly increased to a small minority of 26 percent [ 2 ]. Thus, it is important to examine the factors contributing to a woman’s entrance into a political leadership position. Because each country offers many different political positions, this paper narrows the data by focusing on the highest and most powerful level of political office that a person can hold in each country, whether that be head of state (President), or head of government (Prime Minister). Since there has been heavy research already done regarding social and economic factors influencing women’s empowerment, this paper examines a political factor, or more specifically, the political leaning of the office’s predecessors. All the female heads of state and government in history were listed by country, and each of the female leader’s predecessors were categorized into a political leaning (left, center, right, other). Each country was assigned a “left percentage,” or percentage of left leaning predecessors for each female leader. With more women as world leaders, the world can expect to see the benefits of poverty reduction, economic progress, and increase of public assistance programs.