leadership through crisis: women leaders respond to covid-19

Reflection:

      This event, lead by Dr. Supriya Garikipati, author of “Leading the Pandemic: Does Gender Really Matter?” was one of my favorites thus far. Dr. Garikipati and another speaker, Lynn Ricci, spoke about the ongoing pandemic, the different leadership styles, their effectiveness and the role that gender plays in politics. The essential question asked in the beginning of the event was: “is there a significance of the gender of a leader with COVID-realted deaths?”. To conduct her research, Dr. Garikipati compared women-lead and men-lead countries. She found that women-lead countries had significantly better outcomes, both in terms of deaths and in terms of rates. She then explored the difference in policy and style of communication. To this, she found that women leaders were quicker in shutting down their economy (approximately 24 deaths earlier). This finding was attributed to two traits: decisiveness and communication. Women leaders implemented more effective policies than their male counterparts, including lockdowns, and communication with citizens. For example, Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, explained the science behind the virus to avoid unnecessary tension, conducted Facebook lives and spoke to children. Dr. Garikipati boiled it all down to one thing: empathy. After this thought-provoking sentence, she then spoke about leadership and how gender roles affect the perception of leaders. She stated that leadership is often tied with masculine traits, such as assertiveness, and women are often asked to lean into these traits. But, “leadership should be contextualized, and empathy is a major underlying quality”