Why male leaders are prone to a fatal flaw in dealing with coronavirus – Susan Dalgety

Men who rise to the top often have a particular problem – over-confidence – while women like Angela Merkel and Jacinda Ardern take a more collegiate approach to making life-and-death decisions, writes Susan Dalgety.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson and German Chancellor Angela Merkel at a summit in Berlin in January (Picture: Tobias Schwarz/AFP via Getty Images)

Do women make better leaders? The evidence emerging from how different countries deal with the virus certainly suggests that they do, at least during a global health crisis.

Hidden among the cat memes and #MeAt20 snapshots on my Twitter feed this week was an article in Forbes magazine which asked, “What do countries with the best coronavirus responses have in common?” The answer: women leaders.

And a few days later, up popped another article, this time on the CNN feed. “Women leaders are doing a disproportionately great job at handling the epidemic. So why aren’t there more of them?”

Good question, to which I will return at some point. But first, let’s examine the evidence. Taiwan, New Zealand and four of the five Nordic countries, Finland, Denmark, Norway and Iceland, all have women leaders. And they have all kept the virus under control.

Iceland has, proportionately, tested five times more people than South Korea. There have only been nine deaths so far in New Zealand and less than 100 in Finland. Both have a similar population to Scotland. Norway has used mobile data to track the spread of Covid-19. To date they have had less than 200 deaths.

The most prominent of the world’s women leaders is, of course, Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany. The death toll in Germany is a third of Britain’s, yet its population is much bigger.

Mutti, or Mother, as her fans – and detractors – call Merkel, has even announced a slow, steady withdrawal from Germany’s lockdown, with small shops opening next week, and schools in early May.

Merkel has a distinct advantage over Dominic Raab, our stand-in PM, in that she was a research scientist before becoming a politician. Raab was a lawyer.

‘Caution is the order of the day’

But is Mutti’s scientific background the reason Germany has tested far more people than we have? Did her doctorate in quantum chemistry inform the German health service’s decision to treat people with symptoms far earlier in the course of their illness than we do, so reducing the numbers who need intensive care?

Or is it simply because she is very good at her job and took decisive action early on? “It’s serious,” she told the German people weeks ago. “Take it seriously”.

And in a TV interview earlier this week, she gave a rational, easy-to-understand explanation as to why social distancing works. “The curve has become flatter,” she said. “it needs to be like this so it doesn’t overtax our health system... We are now at about a reproduction factor of one, so one person is infecting another one. If we get to the point where one person infects 1.1 people, then by October we reach capacity in our health system... and if it is up to 1.3 people, then in June we will reach the limits...”

“But it is a fragile situation,” she went on calmly, “where caution is the order of the day, and not over-confidence.”

And therein lies the nub. Over-confidence. As Merkel was warning the German people to take the virus seriously, Boris Johnson was suggesting, in his best public schoolboy tones, that the drive to make urgently needed ventilators should be code-named “Operation Last Gasp”.

And in a show of brazen defiance, honed on the playing fields of Eton, he continued to shake hundreds of hands even as the virus was burning its way through the population.

His over-confidence nearly killed him. And as I write, more than 13,000 people in Britain have already died.

Sturgeon nurses a grievance

The Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, took action early on, closing her country’s borders to almost all travellers a month ago. According to Heathrow Airport’s website, there are still daily flights coming into Britain from New York, the global epicentre of the virus.

When the female president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, got wind of a mysterious virus in Wuhan last December, she restricted all planes from China, increased production of face masks and set up a government pandemic unit.

Boris Johnson struggled to close pubs as late as 20 March, appearing reluctant when he finally took this lifesaving step to end the “ancient, inalienable right of free-born people of the United Kingdom to go to the pub” .

Decades of research has shown that male leaders, in any profession, are likely to have assertive personalities.

The kind of man who strides into a room, slams his opinions on the table and stands back, expecting – and usually getting – a proverbial round of applause. One Donald J Trump springs to mind.

Generally, women take time to listen to the opinion of others before making an informed decision. They are more collegiate in their leadership style, but as Ardern and Merkel have shown in recent weeks, no less effective.

But surely we don’t have to look halfway across the world for an example of an impressive woman in charge. Don’t we have our own home-grown Mutti in Nicola Sturgeon? Early on in the crisis I was quick to support our First Minister. I praised her “calm, honest and authoritative” style. She seemed the very model of a modern woman leader.

Until, that is, she confused her personal nationalism with the national interest. Her handling earlier this week of a non-scandal, where she suggested that Scotland was being denied precious protective equipment by English suppliers at the behest of Westminster, was as cynical a political ploy as anything dreamt up by her very male predecessor, Alex Salmond.

For 24 hours she nursed a grievance that encouraged furious nationalists to take to social media to condemn this evil unionist plot, before backing down and accepting – through gritted teeth – the UK Government’s assurances that there was “no truth” to the rumours. Rather than look for opportunities to advance the nationalist cause as people lie dying, the First Minister should focus on what matters now. Saving lives, saving the economy, saving Scotland.

There will be plenty of time for flag-waving when this is all over – if people still have the energy for it. But until then, Sturgeon needs to ignore the siren calls of her political advisers, and listen instead to her inner woman. It works for Merkel.