Kamala Harris was the first female vice president and the second female nominee for president from one of the major parties. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON – Women have led the governments of nearly a third of the countries on Earth as presidents, prime ministers and chancellors. Vice President Kamala Harris’ defeat kept the 235-year-old glass ceiling in the United States unbroken.
“It absolutely will happen,” said Jean Sinzdak, associate director of the Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics.
Just not yet.
In Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum was sworn in last month as the 66th president and the first woman on that list. Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first female prime minister, held office from 1979 to 1990 – longer than all but six occupants of Downing Street since 1721 when the title was first used.
Angela Merkel led Germany as its first female chancellor from 2005 to 2021, longer than all but two since Otto von Bismarck. Indira Gandhi broke the barrier in India when she became prime minister in 1966, three years before Golda Meir became Israel’s fourth prime minister.
The barrier has been shattered on every continent except Antarctica.
“The U.S. is far behind other nations, unfortunately. I think it will be a slow process,” said Kim Fridkin, an Arizona State University political scientist who studies women in politics, “although women are having more success in gaining office statewide as governors and U.S. senators.”
Of 193 current members of the United Nations, 13 have female leaders now – nine of those for the first time. Sixty have been led by women at some point, according to a Pew Research study, starting with Sri Lanka in 1960.
In the United States, 45 men have served as president, starting with George Washington in 1789. Donald Trump’s reelection extends that streak. He was the 45th president and will be the 47th. Grover Cleveland also served non-consecutive terms.
No major American political party even nominated a woman for president until 2016.
Hillary Clinton, a U.S. senator and former first lady, came close in 2008 but lost the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama. She joined his cabinet as Secretary of State and, with that added credential, nabbed the 2016 nomination, only to lose to Trump, as Harris did on Tuesday when Democrats put a woman on the ticket a second time.
In 1984, former Vice President Walter Mondale named New York Rep. Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate on the Democratic ticket, making her the first female vice presidential nominee from one of the major parties.
Mondale lost to President Ronald Reagan, but it was an important step forward for women in politics.
Arizona Sen. John McCain picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008.
Harris became the third woman nominated for vice president when Biden put her on the ticket in 2020, and she became the nation’s first female vice president.
Five out of seven of the countries in the G7, the group of major Western democracies, have elected a woman as head of government: Canada, Germany, France, Britain and Italy, whose current prime minister is a woman.
Japan and the U.S. are the outliers, and Canada’s only female prime minister, Kim Campbell, held the office for just five months in 1993.
Fourteen members of the G20 have selected a woman for the top job. Apart from the five from the G7, that list includes Argentina, Australia, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Korea and Turkey, plus the European Union.
The half-dozen holdouts in the G20 include three democracies, the United States, Japan and South Africa, plus Russia, Saudi Arabia and China.
“There are cultural factors at play. There are certainly other countries that are more supportive of advancing women’s status culturally overall,” Sinzdak said.
Karen Beckwith, a Case Western Reserve University political scientist who studies women in politics in Western Europe and the U.S., pointed to the difference between a parliamentary system and a presidential system.
In a parliamentary democracy, the parties pick their leaders and the electorate decides whether to put that party into power. That is, voters decide whether a female party leader will become prime minister.
Party insiders can topple a leader in that system. A U.S. president can only be forced from office through impeachment or if the cabinet invokes the 25th Amendment and declares the president incapacitated. Neither has occurred, though the House has impeached three presidents who were later acquitted in the Senate: Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton and Trump, twice.
“A president, once in office, can’t be removed,” Beckwith noted. “This might be part of the reluctance of political parties in the U.S.”
The first hurdle to getting elected president is winning the nomination. Until recent decades, the talent pool of senators and governors was so male-dominated that the odds remained stacked heavily against women having a shot at national office.
If parties are truly committed to eventually electing a woman as president, they need to make intentional efforts to recruit more women for lower office, Sinzdak said.
Only 60 women have ever served in the U.S. Senate, according to Senate records – 25 of them in office now, accounting for one quarter of the chamber’s membership. That includes Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who is retiring.
The U.S. House has 126 female members out of 435, according to the Clerk of the House, plus four women in non-voting seats from U.S. territories and the District of Columbia.
That’s an all-time high. But at the current rate of progress, Beckwith said, it could take another 90 years before Congress has equal numbers of men and women.
Arizona hasn’t seemed to blink at electing women to high office.
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, the fifth female governor of the state, speaks at the Arizona Democratic Party’s election night watch party on Nov. 5, 2024, in Phoenix. (Photo by Samuel Nute/Cronkite News)
The state was the first to have five women as governor, according to data from Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics.
Arizona also was home to the “Fab Five” – the women elected in 1998 to the top statewide offices of governor, secretary of state, attorney general, treasurer and superintendent of public instruction.
Paul Bentz, a conservative analyst at the HighGround consulting firm, said that despite Arizona’s electoral history, factors other than gender worked against Harris. That included her decision to focus more on Trump’s negatives than her own proposals, and the brevity of her campaign after Biden dropped out.
“She had policy challenges” and “she suffered from an onslaught of attacks that were very difficult to come back from,” he said.
Fridkin added that women do face a balancing act when running for office.
They need to project “positive female stereotypes,” she said, while also showing “they are tough, a strong leader, competent and able to deal with issues that don’t conform to gender stereotypes.”
Three days before Election Day, Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update anchor Michael Che summed up the double-standard many experts see for women. He offered a long riff about Trump’s flaws, then quipped, “But this lady got a weird laugh, so I still can’t decide.”
Politics isn’t the only realm with a gender gap at the top. In the Fortune 500, just 10% of CEOs are women and nearly a quarter of them got the job in the last year.
Sinzdak takes heart that, despite Harris’ defeat, her role as vice president and presidential nominee helps normalize the idea of female political leadership.
“Women are just part of the presidential election process and it’s not an unusual thing,” she said.
