menuGender and Politics Reimagined
8
Erasing the Boundaries: Situating the ‘Asian’ among the world’s women leaders
In 2018, I found myself in Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo. I had the privilege of interviewing activists and politicians about former president Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga (1994–2005), often referred to as CBK, the nation’s first woman president and second woman head of government. My visit to Sri Lanka was the start of a long journey to better understand whether women leaders are necessarily better for fellow women and, if so, in what ways these leaders shape the enactment of laws that impact women’s lives. What better place to start than the country that boasts having had the world’s first elected woman leader, CBK’s mother, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, whose party won a landslide victory that saw her named prime minister of what was then Ceylon, as well as its Minister of Defence and External Affairs, back in 1960.
I sat in the office of the director of a Sri Lankan women’s rights NGO, Prisha.1 Prisha and I discussed the patriarchal and multi-religious ideologies that continue to buttress women’s underrepresentation in the Sri Lankan Parliament (Jayasuriya 2011). Despite high measures of social development in areas such as health and education—what some have called a ‘façade of a progressive nation’ (Yatawara 2016: 10)—Sri Lankan women still face a severe absence from politics at all levels of government. This is despite a local government quota introduced in February 2019. While the quota helped to raise the percentage of women from 1.9 per cent to about 25 per cent of elected officials in local government (Election Commission of Sri Lanka 2019; Vijeyarasa 2020), the quota failed to truly diversify politics or enhance respect for the right of women to participate in politics in the first place.
Prisha, like many of my informants, commented on what a remarkable time it was in the mid-1990s in Sri Lanka to have a mother–daughter duo leading the nation: ‘At one point, there was both Sirimavo and Chandrika on stage. It was an amazing time, when Chandrika was President and the mother was Prime Minister’ (Vijeyarasa 2022: 100). This image of women’s leadership presents a stark contrast to Sri Lanka’s political landscape in recent times. Mass protests, beginning in March 2022—known as Aragalaya (‘Struggle’)—ended with Sri Lankan president Gotabaya Rajapaksa fleeing the nation to Singapore via the Maldives, leaving the country economically devastated after a failure of governance: a balance of payments crisis, a bloated public sector and wasteful companies layered with corruption that ‘seemed to flourish’ under Rajapaksa’s leadership (DeVotta 2022: 92). Indeed, the juxtaposition of women leaders Sirimavo and Chandrika Bandaranaike with brothers Mahinda and Gotabaya Rajapaksa would be comical if not so tragic when one is asking what difference presidential leaders make in people’s lives. The tide has, however, perhaps turned with the swearing in of Harini Amarasuriya, female activist and academic, as Sri Lanka’s seventeenth prime minister.
This comparison of female and male leaders reminds us, too, of an overarching assumption that appears to sustain men’s dominance in politics—a notion that leadership is innate to men while women must prove their place. Conversing about Kumaratunga, Prisha recalled the president’s change of hairstyle:
And then she cut her hair. No female politicians can cut their hair. The woman decided to cut her hair and that became a big issue because she had stopped being the image of the strong, South Asian woman. (Vijeyarasa 2022: 106)
As an Australian scholar who lived through the prime ministership of Julia Gillard (2010–13) and the excess attention the press paid to the short hair and other superficial characteristics of Australia’s first and only woman prime minister, it triggered an immediate reflection: Prisha’s observation could have been validly made about a woman leader almost anywhere in the world. The comment was characteristically Asian but also ‘global’. Prisha’s remarks about president Kumaratunga reflected a common burden experienced by women leaders, whose bodies are too often privileged and ‘the mind ignored’, as remarked of former Aotearoa New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark (1999–2008) (Motion 1996: 111). The ‘revamping’ of Clark’s political image was considered newsworthy: women leaders’ physical appearance becomes a political commodity.2 When president Kumaratunga formed a coalition with the Sri Lankan Muslim Congress, the media published cartoons that were replete with ‘sexual undertones’ (Vijeyarasa 2022: 106). Such experiences of women leaders becoming the objects of political discussion and not subjects of political processes are clearly not uniquely Asian. Disgruntled constituents in Sri Lanka were unhappy that president Kumaratunga eschewed social norms with her French-educated ways, short hair and free will as a widow. Her badge as a female president both delighted the crowds—especially some women activists—and confounded many.
At this juncture in the scholarship, we have nearly three decades of comparative multi-country research on women’s leadership in the region (starting as early as Richter’s 1990 theories of female leadership in South and South-East Asia). This academic literature has dissected the pathways into politics of Asia’s women leaders and studied their experiences of executive office as one example of women’s political agency. Yet, perhaps this is precisely the moment to ask whether these experiences have been so starkly different from those of women leaders from other nations and other regions of the world? Have scholars of ‘Asia’—as though there can really be such a thing as ‘Asia’ (for earlier work, see Dirlik 1992; and for a more recent discussion, Khoo 2019)—who have been, rightly, so focused on carving a space for ourselves in the scholarship to amplify what is distinct about the region been at the same time blind to the commonalities that might enable us to build not just a regional but a global theory?
In this chapter, I grapple with these questions to reach one main conclusion. We have categorised and named these experiences as ‘Asian’ to the detriment of our analysis, our understanding and our ability to value these ‘Asian’ women for Asian studies but also for global knowledge. By contrast, I suggest that rather than constructing small categories, in which nothing neatly fits and everything spills over, we should take down the walls and erase some of the lines that we naturally draw as scholars of particular disciplines, particular regions and particular subject matter. With those walls down, an Asian view may serve a fundamental purpose of offering insights that benefit the global community.
I begin this chapter by examining the tendency in the political sciences scholarship to ‘theorise from Asia’. I seek to better understand the dynamic that drags us towards seeing a particularism in the experiences of women in Asia instead of understanding such experiences as a manifestation of global experiences and challenges that are common across postcolonial nations. Indeed, in a collection that calls on us to decolonise our approaches (see Eva-Lina Lawrence, Chapter 5, and Jolly, Chapter 6, in this volume), a global standpoint reminds us of the historical origins of women’s marginalisation from political institutions, whereby women—and non-white people—were sidelined in seemingly masculinist, so-called democratic colonial institutions. My chapter then turns to the central goal of trying to find the global in the local. In doing this, I identify three potential advantages, discussed in the second half of the chapter, to removing the boundaries to offer a global perspective of women’s experiences of executive office.
First, with such a dearth of women making it to executive office, a global perspective enables a stronger narrative of what difference women’s presence as political agents makes in women’s lives. Second, we often and rightly value solidarity among women leaders at other levels of political leadership, including the grassroots, local and national levels (Vanniasinkam and Gunasekera 2022). Here, I argue that a global perspective on women’s leadership may strengthen what are presently very weak institutional structures at the global level for solidarity among the world’s female presidents and prime ministers. Third and finally, a global picture can enable us to theorise from an Asian standpoint and extract lessons for global gain. Here, I focus on the ways in which a global approach to understanding women’s leadership in the region can advance regional and global human rights advocacy, law and policy reform. In short, rather than trying to see Asia as distinct, I aim to emphasise what would be lost in the struggle for women-centred law reform if these ‘Asian lessons’ were viewed as being of little significance to other parts of the world.
Theorising from Asia: Why we do it and what is the cost?
In this section, I discuss the gravitation of scholars of Asia to the region’s women leaders. I seek to offer some reasons for an apparent drive to particularise their experiences but also begin to unpack what is lost in framing these experiences as distinctly and uniquely Asian.
The relatively high number of women who have occupied executive office in Asia is sufficiently stark to be a ‘phenomenon’. Naturally, the academy has responded. In turn, scholarship about women in executive office in the region has proliferated in order to understand the ‘Asian’ nature of their rise. In many respects, we could be forgiven. It is natural that the reproduction of power among political elites in Asia would lead scholars to frame these experiences as a form of Asian exceptionalism (see, for example, Derichs and Thompson 2013; Fleschenberg 2013; Labonne et al. 2015). Presidents such as Corazon Aquino (1986–92), Megawati Sukarnoputri (2001–4) and Kumaratunga (1996–2005) were the ‘suffering martyrs who clung to the threads of patriarchal lineage’ when confronted with the death of a husband or father (Vijeyarasa 2022: 98; see also Rajasingham-Senanyake 2004; Weiner 1995).
Indeed, this is the very narrative I studied as a student of Asian gender studies. Being a housewife is seen as a ‘good’ and natural thing—from the Philippines to Indonesia’s state ibuism (‘motherism’)—enabling these leaders to present themselves as a humble alternative to the male opposition candidate while being not too great an affront to societal expectations. Yet, the ‘housewife’ label permitted the suggestion that these women were unprepared for politics, allowing disgruntled male party elites to overlook the political apprenticeship that so many of these ‘housewives’ had undergone by growing up or living in political homes as members of political families (Jakimow et al. 2023). A mother is someone to be trusted but the role leaves many women juggling an incredibly heavy burden of expectations across the blurred terrain of the personal and political, as the ‘martyr’ and ‘mother of the nation’ who will lead the country out of dictatorship or civil war—clear Asian narratives (Derichs and Thompson 2013; Gerlach 2013; Rajasingham-Senanyake 2004; Thompson 2013; Vijeyarasa 2022: 22). This Asian exceptionalism is so strongly embedded in the literature that it takes a shift in thinking to challenge the ‘Asian’ and seek global commonalities.
Moreover, scholars are vying for space in response to a Global North–driven framework in this field. Somewhat ironically, given the sheer number of women who have held the office of president or prime minister in Asia, efforts to narrate an ‘Asian story’ are partly a response to the neglect of the Asian woman leader. A study written by former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, former Nigerian Minister of Foreign Affairs and the World Trade Organization’s seventh director-general, Women and Leadership: Real Lives, Real Lessons, did not include a single account of a woman leader from Asia or the Pacific (Gillard and Okonjo-Iweala 2020). Minna Cowper-Coles’ review of the state of play of literature on women in politics concludes that the Western and Eurocentric perspectives of women’s rise to and experiences of executive office, and their contributions as national leaders, are undeniably more visible (Cowper-Coles 2020: 13).
Yet, with due respect to the scope of the work undertaken in Cowper-Coles’ review, a literature review can be as biased as the literature itself, as my co-editor Tanya Jakimow highlights in Chapter 1 of this volume. Indeed, this bias in what literature is accessed, studied and included is acknowledged in Peace Medie and Alice Kang’s critique (2018), in which they challenge the dominance of English-language literature in this field and the ‘severe’ underrepresentation of Global South scholars in some of the leading journals addressing women, gender and politics. A literature review can only speak to the literature found and read, creating a demand on Asian and non-Asian scholars to play our part in making more visible scholarship that may be less accessible or simply deliberately not read and valued by other scholars.
Indeed, as Shim demonstrates in this collection (Chapter 2), when one looks at the nationality of authors and the countries that are the subject of 219 studies published between 1991 and 2022 in the Web of Science and Scopus databases, the domination of developed Western democracies in general (making up 80 per cent) and English-speaking ones in particular (making up 45 per cent) is undeniable. Partly this is explained by the fact that these are English-language databases. Nonetheless, literature concerning Hillary Clinton, former US First Lady (1993–2001) and Secretary of State (2009–13) and former US presidential candidate, is probably the most telling. The 32 studies of Clinton between 1996 and 2020 (14.6 per cent of the total) are equivalent to the total number of studies covering 28 countries in the sample. The inclusion of other languages—for instance, Spanish and French—and a study of a different database may have yielded a different result. Shim’s study is revealing of a tendency for research on Global North leaders and using Global North frameworks to be more prominent.
This is not to overstate the absence of Asia’s women leaders in the literature. Global comparative studies have been attempted. While seemingly a very ambitious project, they have been possible precisely because of how few women have risen to the lofty heights of executive office. Gretchen Bauer and Manon Tremblay’s (2011) study of women as heads of state and government (and in cabinet) is the closest attempt: nine regional chapters, including South and South-East Asia in one and ‘Oceania’ in another. The latter acknowledges that Oceania is a highly diverse region, but erroneously and to its detriment focuses on Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (Bauer and Tremblay 2011). Farida Jalalzai’s (2013) global study of women executives is a second example.3 Unsurprisingly, Asia’s leaders find a place in these global collections.
Often, however, the experiences of women leaders from the region are elucidated in chapters and articles offering an Asia-region perspective. Andrea Fleschenberg (2011: 24) has described a comparative study of women in executive office in Asia as ‘at first glance’ an ‘impossible task given the diversity and heterogeneity of the region, its political systems and cultures, gender ideologies and political developments’, but nonetheless attempts this in a chapter in a global book. Even if Asia ends up a little hidden, these comparative studies offer value. The observed patterns and trends enable scholars to extract highly relevant lessons. Scholars of Asia—‘Asianists’—have, for instance, noted the remarkable similarities between the Philippines and Indonesia, where the ‘media, money and machine politics’ dominate (Aspinall 2005: 117).4 Yet, too often these are the only places where Asia’s women leaders are made visible.
In short, there are three key circumstances at play. Women leaders, globally, are a minority but the relatively high number of women leaders in Asia over the past half-century has led scholars to frame their leadership as a form of Asian exceptionalism, thereby carving out a narrative in Asian gender studies. Second and perhaps as a result, in global studies, Asia’s leaders may be entirely absent. Finally, the scholarship that does exist on a global scale tends to be largely comparative studies of Asia, with few lines drawn across regions.
What is Asian? A personal perspective
I am an Australia-born child of migrant parents. My parents were born in Malaysia and migrated to Australia in the mid-1970s. Late in my life, I found out that my grandmother, who had migrated from Sri Lanka, was brought to Malaysia as a teenager to marry my grandfather. In other words, she was what most Global North institutions term a ‘child bride’. My grandmother wore white for more than 30 years after my grandfather died. The role played by my grandmother as a Hindu widow was what most human rights institutions—which I value significantly in my own scholarship—would consider being the ‘subject of the patriarchy’.5 Even later in life I found out that my grandmother’s sister was married into a polygamous relationship.
As the daughter of Malaysia-born parents, I recall studying the role of Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, the wife of Malaysia’s current Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, after he had spent half a century in politics in government and opposition. Perhaps it was during my undergraduate days that my fascination with the place of women in politics began. I recall a persistent sense that surely there must have been more to the remarkable women across Asia who have occupied influential roles in difficult times and in complex sociopolitical contexts than is explained merely by the ‘wives and widows’ syndrome. Since I was first introduced to Wan Azizah, she has been Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia and Minister of Women, Family and Community Development (2018–20), evidently demonstrating the significant roles women hold as political ‘counterparts’.
I have been preoccupied ever since those early days with the question of women’s leadership. Despite spending time, particularly as a lawyer and human rights activist, reflecting on women’s leadership roles in other spaces, including as judges and community leaders of women’s development and human rights organisations, my attention has always been drawn to executive office. Indeed, in my own lifetime, while I have seen shifts in women’s occupation of leadership positions in other challenging spaces—from CEOs of Fortune 500 companies to the benches of international and regional courts—the ground has hardly shifted when it comes to women presidents and prime ministers around the world.
It is with this background that I found myself sitting at the dining table of a former female MP in Colombo who had been a member of president Kumaratunga’s cabinet, when I went to Sri Lanka for that fieldtrip back in 2018. I entered her warm home, grateful for the invitation, and the first thing I saw was a wall-sized portrait of her husband, who had led the Sri Lankan Muslim Congress. This photo was probably put up after he died. He was explicitly and unquestionably the reason she had decided to enter politics in the first place. That male familial stepping stone for a woman entering politics is a story that has global relevance, as will be discussed in this chapter.
She spoke openly and happily of being a Muslim woman in politics, despite how unacceptable that initially was. She remarked how she was ‘all wrapped up, as a good Muslim woman should be’ and therefore eventually it was forgotten that she was a woman and breaking the norm and commentators let her be. What I also remember was being chastised by her for not speaking Tamil and encouraged, to say the least, to make sure I teach my two girls some of my ‘mother tongue’. My mother tongue is English, but I perfectly understood what she meant. That chastising, of not being ‘Asian enough’, has been a common experience for me from my childhood right through to where I am today.
My personal context in writing this chapter naturally leads me to ask whether the kind of patriarchal family values described here are present in many families who migrate to economically advanced countries from other parts of the world. Is the idea of honouring your local language and tradition that different from what you see among migrants living in Europe and in other parts of the world who speak European minority languages, about which plenty has been said (Lonardi 2022; Pérez-Izaguirre et al. 2022)?
In the same ways that regional borders must be blurred in these personal experiences of migration, so must the regional borders in politics. In short, there is too much at risk and much to lose if a blanket label is thrown over everything ‘Asian’ without nuance, without distinctions and without giving visibility to complexities. It calls for a rethink of the experiences of Asia’s women executives to determine whether there is something distinctly Asian about their leadership or whether the experiences of these leaders from South and South Asia are not so distinct from others across the globe. While acknowledging the non-monolithic nature of the category ‘women’, of women leaders and of women leaders from Asia, here I seek to explain both what is universal in their experiences and perhaps, more importantly, what we gain from a global lens.
Finding the global in the local
Women leaders in Asia, despite being relatively high in number, have struggled to find a place in the global narrative. Where their presence is acknowledged and attributed value, it is largely through a lens of Asian exceptionalism. In the second half of this chapter, I offer my views on what are the advantages of instead viewing these experiences as part of a global picture and a global contribution.
Asian women leaders: A foundational piece of the global narrative
Asian experiences of leadership are an important part of a holistic story of women’s leadership that must be told. In other words, there are far too few women who defy barriers and reach the apex of leadership in their nations to allow the global narrative to ignore the stories of their leadership or for these stories to be framed as distinctly Asian and of lesser relevance to the global account.
As of October 2022, there were 32 women presidents and prime ministers worldwide. When women have led, it is sometimes for very short periods, including in Canada, for four months; Ecuador and Madagascar, for two days each; and South Africa, for 14 hours (although she previously briefly served as acting president). In October 2022, Liz Truss became the UK Prime Minister with the shortest tenure in history. Most women leaders are, or have been, their countries’ first and only woman executive (Geiger and Kent 2017), while only a handful of countries—Iceland, Denmark, Aotearoa New Zealand and the United Kingdom—have reached three or four female leaders in their histories.
The dominance of men in executive-level leadership has shaped the practice of politics as well as the narrative. An expectation that leaders adopt so-called masculine leadership styles has fostered a derisive approach to female leadership, which is frequently associated with emotionality, weakness and even hysteria (Jamieson 1995; Wright and Holland 2014: 456). We are at the point where some still consider a woman president or prime minister a gender incongruity comparable with women police chiefs and men nurses (Meeks 2012: 177). While this analogy was drawn some years ago, coincidentally, a domestic battle ensued in Sri Lanka in February 2021 as the Women Parliamentarians’ Caucus, among others, defended the appointment of Bimshani Jasin Arachchi as Sri Lanka’s first and, to date, only female Deputy Inspector General of Police.
In sum, women presidents and prime ministers are hard to come by. With so few women having reached this apex, there is more than ample justification to approach women’s occupation of executive office expansively. By contrast, there is potentially much lost in terms of a platform from which to theorise and extract lessons if Asia’s many experiences are seen as distinct or standalone.
There are indeed many experiences. Even non-experts are familiar with just how many women have risen to leadership in the region: Thailand’s Yingluck Shinawatra (2011–14); the very romanticised rise to power and fall of Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi (2016–21); India’s former prime minister Indira Gandhi (1980–84); Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto (1988–90 and 1993–96); and the alternating tenures of prime ministers Khaleda Zia (1991–96, 2001–06) and Sheikh Hasina (1996–2001, 2009–24) in Bangladesh. In fact, Bangladesh is the only country in the world where a woman has been head of government for more years than a man during the past half-century (WEF 2020: 24). The rarity of women outnumbering men in the global landscape more than justifies inclusion rather than exclusion in the global narrative, both for the ‘good’ stories and the ‘bad’.
It is important, too, to draw attention to how often these Asian women leader’s stories are overlooked even by scholars of Asia. In other words, it is not the Global North framing alone that is to blame. President Megawati presents an excellent example of the erasure of her leadership from four years of Indonesia’s history. This is particularly remarkable given that some describe her as still the most powerful woman in Indonesian politics, as the first and current leader of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (Partai Demokrasi Indonesia Perjuangan) and whose daughter, Puan Maharani, is also a key political figure today.
For instance, in the work of highly regarded scholar Tim Lindsey (whose writing has also benefited me), his analysis of reform to the legal infrastructure and governance in post-crisis Indonesia appears to show a rather broad disregard for the significance of Indonesia having had a woman hold executive office (2007: 14). By contrast, Lindsey refers to other actors—all male—who were considered significant players during Megawati’s era. This example is used here to illustrate the fact that if women leaders in Asia struggle to find a place in the scholarship among ‘Asianists’, we cannot risk erasure altogether by encouraging an approach to women’s experiences of politics in the region that further justifies minimal attention or exclusion altogether.
Importantly, the arguments presented here remain as true for women in executive office in Asia as in the Pacific region. The inclusion of the experiences of women leaders from Pacific Island countries is perhaps particularly necessary because of the very low levels of female representation in most parts of the region. Pacific women have risen to executive office despite the general exclusion of women from state political institutions. Dr Hilda Heine was the first woman to head the Republic of the Marshall Islands (2016–20); Afioga Fiamē Naomi Mata’afa was the first woman to serve as the Prime Minister of Samoa (2021–25). I separately note that Aotearoa New Zealand has had three women prime ministers in its history—Jenny Shipley (1997–99), Helen Clark (1999–2008) and Jacinda Ardern (2017–22)—not wanting to merge the Australian and New Zealand experiences with those of Pacific Island nations, which too often risks presenting a false picture of the Oceanic experiences of women’s political participation in global statistics.
In short, Asia’s women leaders make up a notable portion of the few women who have risen to these high ranks. With such a small sample from which to draw and renarrate an alternative story of what happens when women are present in executive office—for good and bad—we must see Asia’s leaders as part of a bigger whole, rather than an exception.
Deconstructing the narrative to identify the global
Scholars are hesitant to undertake regional comparisons of women leaders across Asia (Fleschenberg 2011: 24). This hesitancy escalates when it comes to multiregional or even global comparisons. Yet, the similarities in the experiences of women leaders globally invite such a comparison. I suggest that the failure to see the potential in such comparative analysis, and to identify commonalities, has hindered the creation and effectiveness of solidarity-building platforms for women leaders worldwide.
I am hardly the first scholar to identify the similarities in the experiences of women presidents and prime ministers. Numerous examples on a global scale illustrate the ‘double bind’ of which Kathleen Hall Jamieson (1995: 16) spoke many years ago in offering a ‘feminine’ leadership yet still fitting masculine moulds. There is an impossible juggling act in pursuing the public’s desire for a woman leader who is feminine, but not too feminine, while avoiding being seen as ‘playing the gender card’ (see, for example, Donaghue 2015; McLean and Maalsen 2017). This double bind is as much a reality in Asia as elsewhere. While president Kumaratunga eschewed those gendered norms (Vijeyarasa 2022: 255), the Philippines’ Corazon Aquino called on these narratives to aid her rise to power and her anticorruption agenda as a ‘crusading housewife let loose in a den of world-class thieves’ (Vijeyarasa 2022: 108). It is a constant back and forth with which female leaders must wrestle.
Yet, many world leaders outside the region have evidently also struggled with this ‘double bind’. Britain’s ‘Iron Lady’, Margaret Thatcher (1979–90), was photographed in the kitchen of 10 Downing Street while she was prime minister, while Liberian supporters of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, former president of Liberia (2006–18) and the first elected woman head of state in Africa, waved signs at rallies stating, ‘Ellen, she’s our man’ (Thomas and Adams 2010: 118). One Sri Lankan scholar drew positive parallels between president Kumaratunga’s leadership style and that of Thatcher, saying, ‘Chandrika played with that hypermasculinity in her peace agenda’—a woman leader tough enough to contest the civil war and promise what no leader before her had achieved (Vijeyarasa 2022: 105). Again, we can move beyond borders and beyond regions to identify this common leadership style. The parallels envisaged between Sri Lanka’s Kumaratunga and Britain’s Thatcher worked as much in Thatcher’s favour as against her (Pilcher 1995: 494) when she was seen as compromising her femininity for power (Whitehead 2007: 238). This same gender paradox was noted by one Sri Lankan informant critical of both president Kumaratunga and her mother, saying they demonstrated a ‘total insensitivity to women’s issues’ (Vijeyarasa 2022: 108); despite turning up, they were often late to meetings of the Sri Lankan Mothers’ Front and the first to leave.
Widowhood is worn as a badge among Asia’s women leaders. In fact, the successful presidential election campaign of Kumaratunga in 1994 was dubbed the ‘Battle of the Widows’ when she (widowed after her husband’s 1988 assassination) ran against Srima Dissanayake, the spouse of the opposition candidate, who had been killed shortly before the election in a suicide-bomb attack and whose candidacy she replaced (Weiner 1995). This is just one example of the stepping stones into politics in Asia that are dependent on male connections and amplified in scholarship about Asia.
Yet, the parallels with Latin America, where a pathway dependent on male lineage is also common, are stark. Argentina’s Isabel Martínez de Perón (president, 1974–76), Panama’s Mireya Moscoso Rodríguez de Arias (president, 1999–2004), Guyana’s Janet Jagan (prime minister, March–December 1997; president, 1997–99) and Argentina’s Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (president, 2007–15; Vice-President 2019–present) were all married to male leaders of their countries (Jalalzai 2010: 150). In Africa, too, the husband of Malawi’s Joyce Banda (vice-president, 2009–12; president, 2012–14) was the country’s former chief justice. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton’s path as, first, US First Lady (1993–2001) and, later, presidential candidate is well known worldwide. What is so commonly described as an ‘Asian’ phenomenon of wives and widows is indeed a global commonality.
Most countries have never gone beyond one woman leader. Being the ‘female first’ is another reality that unites women leaders beyond cultural and geographic limits. How that manifests may be country specific but the manipulation of one’s gender to characterise women as unsuitable for such leadership roles is unifying. The response to Indonesia’s first and only female leader, Megawati, announcing that she would run as a candidate for the 1999 presidential election says much about what it means to be a ‘female first’ and its significance for the Islamic community, but also for Indonesian society in general (Dewi 2015: 61). The Congress of Indonesian Muslims (Kongres Umat Islam Indonesia) in November 1998 recommended that the Indonesian Ulema Council (Majelis Ulama Indonesia) publish a fatwa challenging female leadership, titled ‘Perempuan Untuk Sementara Tidak Dibenarkan Jadi Presiden’ (loosely translated as ‘For the time being, women are not allowed to be president’) (Dewi 2015: 61).
What subsequently unfolded was the manipulation of Megawati’s gender by those around her, foremost among them Abdurrahman Wahid, long-time president of the Nahdlatul Ulama religious organisation, founder of the National Awakening Party and the presidential alternative to Megawati. The 1999 election campaign in Indonesia saw the use of banners by the United Development Party’s youth wing pronouncing, ‘A Woman President—No Way!’ (Suryakusuma and Johnson 2001: 11), while the Indonesian Islamic Party of Liberation (Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia) cited an infamous Hadith: ‘A nation which makes a woman its ruler will never succeed’ (Dewi 2015: 62). Yet, if one were to draw comparisons more critically across the region, these challenges for a woman stepping up to be a nation’s first female leader are not common. Pakistan and Bangladesh, despite being Muslim-majority nations, did not see the same backlash as Indonesia. The sufferings of president Megawati when she first raised her hand to contest may be more similar to, for example, Liberia’s Sirleaf, Malawi’s Banda or even Italy’s Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, and Australia’s Gillard.
If we are to acknowledge and draw new lines and connections between past and present female leaders across countries and regions, we may also see heightened success in attempts to build solidarity among such leaders. In 1996, an independent, self-governing network, the Council of Women World Leaders, was established by Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, President of Iceland (1980–96), Mary Robinson, President of Ireland (1990–97), and Laura Liswood, who became the council’s secretary-general (Council of Women World Leaders 2021). It has received minimal scholarly attention. What has been said acknowledges the importance of women world leaders having a space for solidarity (Hoogensen and Solheim 2006: 109), but again, questions its value by asking whether the voice of women world leaders can be collectivised. It is worth noting that rarely are such critiques directed at ‘male leader’ collectives and only in recent times has a spattering of voices—mine among them—sought to point out the loss for the world when far too few women have a seat in global decision-making spaces like the G7 or G20. Despite the need for such female-centred spaces, the critiques go on. By finding greater dissimilarity than commonality, scholars have described the work of the Council of Women World Leaders as a ‘monolithic corporate rhetoric’ that attempts to speak on behalf of what is a highly diverse group of women from highly diverse geopolitical contexts (Richards and Dingo 2014: 43). In this scant scholarship, the council has been critiqued as fraught for its masculinised language and for obscuring differences between members (Richards and Dingo 2014: 116).
These harsh evaluations—while valid in part—overlook the significant potential of this assembly of women leaders to illustrate why women’s leadership matters, to offer such leaders mutual support, to provide a platform for further research and to possibly build a collective consciousness among the world’s women leaders of their capacity and, arguably, their responsibility to make visible women’s issues. Its virtual meetings in recent years have been dedicated to gender-based violence and what a diversity of leadership can mean for advancing gender equality globally (Council of Women World Leaders 2021).
The sixty-sixth US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, launched another such group, a collaboration that included the tenure of Philippines president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Like the council, the Women Leaders’ Working Group was explicit in seeking ‘to ensure that women’s empowerment issues such as education, political and economic empowerment, and access to justice are international priorities’ (Department of State 2008). It was at one Women Leaders’ Working Group meeting that president Macapagal Arroyo declared:
So, as women leaders, we must be champions of women in this special hour of need. It is now, more than ever, that we need women’s voices to be heard to fight for the rights and opportunities of women both in our respective nations and in the whole world. (Macapagal Arroyo 2008)
President Macapagal Arroyo was hardly a voice for women and yet here we must acknowledge her attempt to rise above the singularity of the Philippines and place greater value on a collective of global women leaders.
Learning from what makes Asia distinct for global gain
What does ‘Asia’ have to offer the world? In this final section, I acknowledge that there are attributes to women’s leadership that are distinct to the region, but I seek to do so in a way that amplifies what lessons can be extracted for global gain due to their applicability beyond Asia. Rather than contradicting my argument against Asian specificity, I seek to demonstrate that Asia does have something particular to offer. Yet, it is, in many respects, the flip side of the coin: there is a problem in excluding Asian experiences from the global narrative, as noted earlier, but we must also understand what global value can be drawn from these Asian experiences, rather than diminishing or devaluing Asia by assuming their relevance is only to the region. These ‘Asian’ lessons, if seen as part of a bigger, global picture, allow us to theorise and learn from the Asian platform.
All three women whom I studied for my monograph The Woman President led in a distinctive political atmosphere (Vijeyarasa 2022). I have witnessed at first hand the vibrancy of women’s movements in the region and in the Philippines and Sri Lanka in particular, and the collectivisation of women’s struggles in a way that articulates a demand for change well ahead of global women’s movements. I will never forget the feeling of joining a sea of women activists in Manila to protest gender-based violence in December 2004. There is also something seemingly unique in the small but notable numbers of women who manage a transition from movement activism to politics in the region. Here, I think about the Philippine’s Risa Hontiveros, a serving senator since 2016, and Indonesia’s Nursyahbani Katjasungkana, elected as an MP for the Islam-based People’s Awakening Party (2004–09), although without suggesting that the pathway for either was easy. I have had the privilege of interviewing both women during my research.
There are many lessons to extract from how women’s movements in Asia make the most of the presence of a woman leader to push through reforms to laws on gender-based violence, equality and non-discrimination at work. These lessons can be of global benefit. Women’s movements in the region use the votes of women as a negotiating tool to achieve significant law reform, specifically when women lead. Collaboration among feminist activists, women in the legislature and, to borrow an Australian term, ‘femocrats’ or inside agitators (Sawer 1996, 2007) in ‘triangles of empowerment’ (Holli 2008: 169) was accelerated when these women were president. From a gender lens being applied to the Philippines Development Plan (1989), gender-based violence laws enacted in the Philippines (2004), Indonesia (2004) and Sri Lanka (2005), and Indonesia’s introduction of a quota for gender equality in parliament (2004), many lessons can be extracted for how women in government can collaborate with women’s groups to use the ‘women’s vote’ to achieve feminist goals when women occupy executive office (Vijeyarasa 2021b). In fact, these nations are in many ways global leaders. The Philippines introduced 10 days of paid leave from work for victims of gender-based violence before any other nation in the world (Republic of the Philippines 2004: S. 43).
There is equally much for the global community to learn from their struggles, including the less successful fights of Filipino women whose reproductive rights were most supressed under the country’s two female presidents. The Aquino administration offered the Catholic Church reassurance that abortion would remain illegal even as foreign aid flowed into the Philippines, while president Macapagal Arroyo rejected all forms of modern contraceptive as forms of abortion, limited government support for family planning to natural methods for married couples and restricted access to emergency contraception (Austria 2004: 96). Both Aquino and Macapagal Arroyo demonstrate that women presidents, too, ‘can become captives of the gender ideology’ (Son 2005). If Asia is seen within this global setting, the struggles and strategies developed in response to these events can aid activists seeking to advance reproductive rights in parts of the Americas, Africa and Europe, in countries with or without women leaders.
Meanwhile, when the Tsunami struck at the tail end of president Kumaratunga’s leadership on 26 December 2004, she was able to bring a gender lens to the government’s response. In May 2005, the Disaster Management Act was passed by parliament and a disaster management centre was operational by September of that year (Parliament of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka 2005a). The Kumaratunga government brought into effect the Tsunami (Special Provisions) Act (Parliament of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka 2005b) and approved the National Committee on Women to mainstream gender in the post-tsunami recovery and reconstruction, with a specific focus on widows, livelihood assistance for women, the appointment of women to disaster management committees at all levels and providing land rights and ensuring joint ownership for women. The policy, like many, was not perfect but nonetheless shows global leadership from which other nations have much to gain.
Conclusion
Asia’s women leaders are a phenomenon—because they are relatively high in number. They have also risen to leadership in a region often characterised as particularly patriarchal, although, in my view, patriarchy is truly a global phenomenon even if its manifestation may be more or less overt in some places than others. Asia’s women leaders stand out because they have been framed as living a very particular Asian experience of leadership.
This chapter has sought to challenge this view, finding a place for Asia’s leaders in the global narrative but also illustrating what is to be gained for global knowledge about women leaders when we see these Asian experiences as more than just ‘Asian’. This is not to diminish or discount what is unique to the region, or devalue what is culturally significant. Rather, my goal has been to draw new lines across the global map that stretch us from Asia to Africa, or Europe to Africa, as well as across South and South-East Asia, where the lines have been etched by several decades of scholarship.
We are left with a narrative that is more open. Borders offer contained stories, silos and chapters in which to put various leaders and their experiences. Yet, this chapter has also demonstrated that there is more to lose by creating silos than by seeking some degree of erasure of these boundaries. Hopefully, the result is a narrative in which the region’s female leaders always find a place, where overlaps in their experiences of leadership with those of other women leaders around the world are visible and yet the distinct achievements, successes and strategies of women leaders in the region, as well as Asia’s movements, legislators and ‘femocrats’, are valued for what they can teach the rest of the world.
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1 Name changed for anonymity. My interview with Prisha was one of 50 conducted in Indonesia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka. Ethics approval was obtained from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS HREC ETH17-1449). All interviews were transcribed and coded using grounded theory (Corbin and Strauss 2008).
2 At the same time, it is incorrect to argue that this is a problem unique to female politicians: the same media scrutiny of male politicians’ physical appearances is documented, for instance, in the case of Australia’s male executives (Campbell 2003: 17), albeit this is rarely based on a male leader’s body (Sinclair 2013: 239).
3 For another example, see the valuable edited collection by Janet Martin and MaryAnne Borrelli (2016), which contains some chapters that are comparative but the majority of which are single-country case studies, with a particular focus on the United States.
4 In making this argument, Edward Aspinall (2005: 119) refers to the power held in the hands of a few—‘former bureaucrats, political fixers and politically connected business interests’—arguably in stark opposition to the ‘rowdy, student-led popular protest movement alongside mass rioting among the urban poor’ that ‘drove the political crisis that ended the Suharto regime’ (p. 120). In Indonesia today, in contrast to such free and somewhat disorganised politics of protest, ‘machine politics’ has seen a rise in the ‘professional political stratum, modern campaigning techniques and big money’ (p. 120). The Philippines, too, Aspinall argues, is characterised by systematic vote-buying and political corruption. One important distinction to make, which has proved particularly relevant to understanding women’s movements in Indonesia, is that Indonesia is dominated by ‘mass-based political forces that derive sustenance from resilient socioreligious identities’ (p. 122).
5 The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) has been the subject of much of my scholarship in recent years (Vijeyarasa 2021a). While the CEDAW does not explicitly refer to the ‘patriarchy’, in softer terms, it seeks the elimination of ‘prejudices and customary and all other practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority or the superiority of either of the sexes or on stereotyped roles for men and women’ (UNGA 1979: Art. 5). By virtue of being a global human rights treaty, it tends to adopt a singular approach to issues, including the role of religion in shaping women’s lives, unable to sufficiently value the importance of religion for some individuals while critiquing the limits religion may impose on women’s lives.
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