ARE female leaders better for the world’s women?
It would be nice to think that women who achieve power would want to
help women at the bottom. But one continuing global drama underscores
that women in power can be every bit as contemptible as men.
Sheikh Hasina, prime minister of Bangladesh, is mounting a scorched-earth offensive against Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank and champion of the economic empowerment of women around the world. Yunus, 72, won a Nobel Peace Prize for his pioneering work in microfinance, focused on helping women lift their families out of poverty.
Yet Sheikh Hasina’s government has already driven Yunus from his job
as managing director of Grameen Bank. Worse, since last month, her
government has tried to seize control of the bank from its 5.5 million
small-time shareholders, almost all of them women, who collectively own
more than 95 percent of the bank.
What a topsy-turvy picture: We see a woman who has benefited from
evolving gender norms using her government powers to destroy the life’s
work of a man who has done as much for the world’s most vulnerable women
as anybody on earth.
The government has also started various investigations of Yunus and his
finances and taxes, and his supporters fear that he might be arrested on
some pretext or another.
“It’s an insane situation,” Yunus told me a few days ago at the Clinton
Global Initiative in New York, sounding subdued instead of his normally
exuberant self. “I just don’t know how to deal with it.”
If the government succeeds in turning Grameen Bank into a government bank, Yunus said, “it is finished.”
Sheikh Hasina, in New York for the United Nations General Assembly,
initially agreed to be interviewed by me in a suite at the Grand Hyatt.
At the last minute she canceled and refused to reschedule.
Perhaps none of this should be surprising. Metrics like girls’ education
and maternal mortality don’t improve more when a nation is led by a
woman. There is evidence that women matter as local leaders and on
corporate boards, but that doesn’t seem to have been true at the
national level, at least not for the first cohort of female leaders
around the world.
Bangladesh is actually a prime example of the returns from investing in
women. When it separated from Pakistan in 1971, it was a wreck. But it
invested in girls’ education, and today more than half of its high
school students are female — an astonishing achievement for an
impoverished Muslim country.
All those educated women formed the basis for Bangladesh’s garment
industry. They also had fewer births: the average Bangladeshi woman now
has 2.2 children,
down from 6 in 1980. Bringing women into the mainstream also seems to
have soothed extremism, which is much less of a concern than in Pakistan
(where female literacy in the tribal areas is only 3 percent).
To her credit, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has spoken up for
Yunus: “I highly respect Muhammad Yunus, and I highly respect the work
that he has done, and I am hoping to see it continue without being in
any way undermined or affected by any government action,” she said
earlier this year. Two former secretaries of state, George Shultz and Madeleine Albright, have also called on Sheikh Hasina to back off.
She shows no sign of doing so. One theory is that she is paranoid and
sees Yunus as a threat, especially since he made an abortive effort to
enter politics in 2007. Another theory is that she is envious of his
Nobel Peace Prize and resentful of his global renown.
Sheikh Hasina is disappointing in other ways. She has turned a blind eye
to murders widely attributed to the security services. My Times
colleague Jim Yardley
wrote just this month about a labor leader, Aminul Islam, who had been
threatened by security officers and whose tortured body was found in a
pauper’s grave.
Yunus fans are signing a Change.org
petition on his behalf, but I’d like to see more American officials and
politicians speak up for him. President Obama, how about another photo
op with Yunus?
I still strongly believe that we need more women in leadership posts at
home and around the world, from presidential palaces to corporate
boards. The evidence suggests that diverse leadership leads to better
decision making, and I think future generations of female leaders may be
more attentive to women’s issues than the first.
In any case, this painful episode in Bangladesh is a reminder that the
struggle to achieve gender equality isn’t simply a battle between the
sexes.
It is far more subtle. Misogyny and indifference remain obstacles for
women globally, but those are values that can be absorbed and
transmitted by women as well as by men.
