Sworn in as president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf vowed to attack the corruption that lay beneath the recent bloodshed and despair in her African nation.
In Chile, newly inaugurated President Michelle Bachelet, tortured as a teen during a dictatorship, was propelled to power by voters who were weary of machismo politics and corrupt leaders.
Angela Merkel, elected in November as Germany’s first woman chancellor, leaped to power earlier in her career after her mentor, ex-Chancellor Helmut Kohl, was cut down by a slush-fund scandal.
Where trouble and corruption hang in the air, voters around the world are increasingly turning to women to clean up the mess left behind by bad-old-boy networks.
The United States trails much of the world in the success of female candidates, ranking behind dozens of countries in the percentage of women elected to parliamentary bodies. That is due in large measure to the fact that about 70 countries now prescribe hard quotas or voluntary goals for women’s participation.
But some U.S. strategists believe the budding lobbying scandal in Washington will heighten the chances of women candidates who are trying to unseat Congressional incumbents in November. And the groundbreaking successes of women in other nations have helped rekindle talk about if, and when, a woman will be elected to the White House.
“People are talking about Hillary and Condi and thinking why, if it can happen in Germany and Chile and Liberia, can’t it happen in the United States?” said Yolanda Richardson, president of the Center for Development and Population Activities, a Washington-based nonprofit group that works to improve the lives of women and girls.
She was referring to Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, spouse of the ex-president and a leading light in the Democratic Party; and Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state whose political fortunes received a boost recently when First Lady Laura Bush said she should run for the Republicanas’ presidential nomination.
Political veterans wonder if 2008 is a realistic goal for a woman reaching the presidency, given Clinton’s lightning-rod status and Rice’s assertion that she won’t run.
Nonetheless, Richardson and other strategists say that around the world, women are fast climbing into new realms of power.
“The trend lines are good. Increasingly there are breakthroughs in women achieving leadership positions, and it’s happening faster than ever before,” she said.
In 1995 at the United Nations Conference on Women in Beijing, governments set a goal of women achieving at least 30 percent of seats in national parliaments. Thus far, women have succeeded in commanding only about 16 percent of those seats.
But that amounts to an all-time high today of 6,690 seats, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Geneva, reflecting some key gains in the past year.
Some of the biggest gains reflect women rising to leadership in troubled lands. Liberia, where the Harvard-educated Johnson-Sirleaf took over, had been ravaged by two decades of instability and civil war that claimed 150,000 lives.
Analysts say it’s no accident that the world’s parliamentary body with the biggest share of women is found in Rwanda, where women hold 48.8 percent of the seats. In the 1990s, tribal fighting in the central African nation triggered genocide and some of the most horrific human cruelty in recent history.
Kavita Ramdas has paid special attention to Africa as president of the Global Fund for Women, a San Francisco- based organization that distributes grants to women’s groups around the world.
She says that women’s recent political successes in Liberia and elsewhere in Africa “are very much related to the decimation of the continent by AIDS and civil conflict.”
She added, “The emergence of a women’s political voice is almost directly linked to the exhaustion of alternatives.”
In 2001, a World Bank report on gender discrimination reported that less corruption exists where women govern.
Ramdas observed that in Afghanistan, voters in September expressed a desire to rid their war-wracked land of male-
dominated corruption. They elected 68 women in the country’s first parliamentary election in more than 30 years; a quarter of the 249-member legislative body is reserved for women under the country’s postwar constitution.
“People say they trust women more than men because they are not corupt,” she said.