Refracting success through gender: persistent sexism during the Covid-19 crisis

Mette Frederiksen, Prime Minister of Denmark

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Katie Sperring takes a closer look at the celebration of how female leaders have handled the coronavirus pandemic. 

In recent weeks, prominent publications have flooded us with articles gushing about how female leaders have excelled during the coronavirus pandemic as exemplars of compassionate crisis leadership. Upon first reading such pieces, I saw them as casting well-deserved light upon successful female leaders – Jacinda Ardern, Silveria Jacobs and Mette Frederiksen to name a few. However, as I read more and more articles in this vein, my thoughts changed, at first gradually and then suddenly all at once.

My conclusion is this: women overcome all manner of obstacles to attain and thrive in positions of leadership, but the praise of that leadership is still refracted through the sexist narratives that make up those very obstacles. If anything, all of this gushing about the brilliance of female leaders in this crisis is only an indication of how far we still have to go. It might be true that overtly sexist narratives are somewhat less frequent, but we now face something potentially more insidious: a sexist narrative veiled in an ostensibly empowering one.

Allow me to give you some examples. Forbes is by far the worst and most prolific offender, publishing multiple articles that exemplify the ostensibly empowering but actually sexist narrative. “Women are stepping up to show the world how to manage a messy patch for our human family” enthused one piece entitled, “What do countries with the best coronavirus response have in common? Women leaders”. Another piece marvelled at the fact that women “are just as good and sometimes better at some of what we think of as male qualities, like being decisive and making tough calls”. Not only is this an embarrassingly thin veil over a gendered stereotype about the characteristics women (and men) typically exhibit, they use the term ‘we’ as if  there is a collective consensus about this and ‘we’ should all be shocked by what they seem to view as surprising deviation from their embedded stereotype.

Yet another piece, this one entitled, “What’s the surprising leadership lesson in the COVID-19 crisis?” informs us of the “surprising” lesson: “the very leadership qualities we need right now – that we value and crave right now – are those studies show are associated with the way women lead”. Again, praising women for the “surprising” fact that their leadership has been successful thinly veils the prejudice that female success in leadership is somehow unusual or contrary to our expectations and makes that prejudice the premise from which praise is given.   

Forbes have trodden and then terrifically tumbled over a fine line between celebrating the achievements of women in spite of sexist narratives, and implicitly employing those very narratives themselves to refract the success of women through gendered tropes. As Jia Tolentino, writer for the New Yorker and author of the recently published book of essays, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, eloquently muses, “women have had to overcome so many obstacles to attain success that their success is forever refracted through those obstacles”.

The true celebration will be when these narratives do not infiltrate discourse about women at all. Again, Tolentino encapsulates my sentiment wonderfully: “The freedom I want is located in a world where we wouldn’t need to love women, or even monitor our feelings about women as meaningful – in which we wouldn’t need to parse the contours of female worth and liberation by paying meticulous personal attention to any of this at all”. In this context, the commentary on women in public office and positions of influence, ‘freedom’ will be when we don’t consider success through the prism of gender at all. I certainly want to celebrate the successes of Ardern and Jacobs, and more broadly the successes of women the world over, but not by employing the very narratives and stereotypes that have held women back for centuries and continue to do so. Ideally, it would be independent of any gender-based narrative altogether.

When female success is framed exclusively in this way , it is not only faux-progressive for women’s advancement but also risks and often leads to omission of other relevant factors. For example, female leaders are disproportionately elected in countries where the political culture is conducive: there is “a relative support and trust in the government,” says Kathleen Gerson, a sociology professor from NYU. It is linked to the wider issue of men still dominating public office and leadership positions the world over. We are by no means in a position where narratives about female leaders are the only problem; the scarcity of elected female leaders remains deeply problematic. However, the problem of sexist narratives in commentary on female leaders might be chronologically secondary to the problem of whether or not female leaders exist at all but it is by no means secondary in its potential implications.

In many ways, it is even more concerning when sexist narratives are veiled as expressions of progressive sentiment with regard to female leadership, than when they are overtly sexist and accompany overtly sexist actions. Like I said, when I first read some of these pieces, I saw in them only the ostensible praise for female leadership before realising them to be potentially more problematic. Progress towards gender equality will stagnate if we don’t pick up on these things and challenge them. This stagnation is ever more likely because of the subtlety of this problem compared to previous, more blatant sexism. The very problem lies in what can also be called progress.

By no means do I wish to deny the existence of progress, women's occupation of public office and the appreciation of their success should certainly be celebrated. This is still, however, less a beacon of progress and more an indication of what is still to be overcome. I hope for a day where we don’t use gender stereotypes to formulate opinions on women’s successes. The first step is recognising that it is being done in the first place. Don’t be fooled by a more subtle form of sexism being veiled as true progressivism.

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