- Trust in women leaders is decreasing across the globe, a new study found.
- Experts say that the normalization of sexism, as well as perceived failures of some female leaders, may be why.
The last few years saw a perfect storm of high-profile corruption, a lack of childcare options, and sexist rhetoric from one of the the most powerful politicians in America — and it caused people to lose trust in women leaders.
That's according to new data from The Reykjavik Index for Leadership, an annual survey that evaluates how people view men and women in terms of their suitability for positions of power. The survey, which was taken by over 30,000 people across the G20 countries, found that trust in women as leaders has fallen significantly over the past year.
Only 47% of respondents in the G7 countries of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US said that they were "'very comfortable" having a woman as a CEO in their respective countries, a decline from 54% a year before. When it comes to politics, responses to women leaders skewed along the same lines, with just 45% of those polled in the G7 saying they were "very comfortable" with a woman leading their government, from 52% in 2021.
Researchers say that it's a perception issue that the pandemic and the current political climate have fueled.
Elizabeth Holmes, the former Theranos CEO and world's youngest female self-made billionaire, was recently found guilty of wire fraud and conspiracy in a high-profile case that captured public attention before and after the fall of the company. Former President Donald Trump has been accused numerous times of sexual misconduct and was viewed by most voters as sexist during his presidency, with critics saying that his behavior has helped normalize bigotry.
And on top of that, the pandemic childcare crisis has not only impacted women's careers, it's likely affected the way that people view women's careers, BBC's Josie Cox reported.
"There are nearly 1.2 million extremely qualified women who haven't returned to the workforce," President Biden said in April. "There's a simple reason: There's no affordable childcare for them."
"We love to villainize women. It's part of our culture."
The Reykjavik researchers said that the historic appointment of Vice President Kamala Harris to the executive branch, as well as the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg in 2020, helped signal "how important gender is in American politics" recently. But the glass-ceiling-shattering accomplishments of these women competed with what were perceived as the very public failures of others, experts told BBC.
"We love to villainize women. It's part of our culture," Julie Castro Abrams, CEO and chair of How Women Lead, a US network of more than 13,000 women dedicated to promoting diverse voices and leadership, told BBC. "When you get more women into leadership, that behavior starts to come out, because a woman in leadership upsets the accepted narrative that we've all learned… And people love to see women fail because a woman succeeding doesn't fit into the narrative we've all been taught."
In particular, she pointed out that when Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election to Trump, many media outlets speculated whether America was really ready for a female president. That's paired alongside Trump's history of racist and sexist comments, which critics and researchers said have contributed to a mainstreaming of such bigotry.
Another high-profile failure by a woman in business captured the world's attention as well. In the case of someone like Elizabeth Holmes, female entrepreneurs have reported that they feel constantly compared to the Theranos founder in the face of her company's collapse.
"Such serious cases of fraud, where, in the end, false diagnoses were made, make it harder for us, who genuinely want to achieve improvements in women's health," Miriam Santer, cofounder of The Blood, a menstrual blood-testing startup, told Insider's Tasmin Lockwood in January.
And across the globe, the pandemic's disproportionate impact on childcare access means that women are still working less.
Danna Greenberg, a professor of organizational behavior at Babson College told BBC that women leaving the workforce and picking up the bulk of childcare duties over the last few years led to a "hardening of old traditional assumptions" about the role of women at work and in the home. This, Greenberg believes, has made "bias against women more socially acceptable."
It's true even in countries like Canada, which scored the highest amongst the countries in the report: month's into the country's COVID lockdown, women's participation in the workforce fell from a historic high to its lowest level in 30 years, with more than 1.5 million women losing their jobs.
"Perception matters: it manifests in numerous and deepening inequalities across every aspect of society, government, and business," the researchers wrote. "It impacts the paths of careers, interrupting earning potential and access to basic livelihoods."