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.
First
published in the New York Times Sunday Review, September 29, 2012
Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times since 2001, writes op-ed columns that
appear twice a week. He won the Pulitzer Prize two times, in 1990 and 2006
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