Are Women Better Leaders In A Pandemic?

By Andi Simon, Ph.D.

There has been amazement and fascination, discussion and debate, about how effectively Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand, and many other women leaders around the world, from mayors to governors to presidents, are managing the coronavirus pandemic.

“Why?” is the bigger question. We can point to the observations that they were decisive. They were collaborative and inclusive, bringing together scientists and community leaders to develop a galvanized national response with clarity, backed up by research. They used innovative technology to help track and trace those who tested positive. And possibly their countries were easier to manage because they could close borders or restrict movement, or because, in the case of leaders such as Ardern, their countries were islands.

But maybe the answer lies in the fact that there is something intrinsically different in how men and women lead. We are learning a great deal from neuroscience and from scientific research on human evolution about the different ways men and women have developed, within the womb and after. Males and females enter the world ready to tackle life in very different, but complementary, ways.

Women see others as people they want to get to know, with whom theywant to socialize, collaborate and find creative solutions. They develop a larger hippocampus, an area of the brain that is critical to learning and memorization, and theirs works differently than a man’s. Women also produce more oxytocin — the love, bonding and sharing hormone.

Conversely, a man’s amygdala — the area of the brain associated with the experiencing of emotions and the recollection of those experiences — is larger than a woman’s. This is what protects us from the unfamiliar and the unknown, encouraging us to flee, fight or appease things that frighten us. It is no surprise that men are often “bad boys” getting into battle, or just trouble. They simply see the world through a different lens than women do.

Which brings us to the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic. Given the differences and similarities of men and women, it should come as no surprise that they would see this crisis in very different ways. Men in leadership positions rose to the battle as if they could overwhelm it with strength and fortitude, without much science or fact-checking.

Often, those who have followed them have felt that the pandemic was a hoax, something not much more dangerous than a common cold. Certainly, those followers’ amygdalas were fearing it, fleeing it and battling the unfamiliar with brute force, and sadly, not much more.

On the other hand, the world’s women leaders with their “we” mentality had a lot of oxytocin flowing and saw how they might negotiate this virus into submission. Jacinda Ardern helped coax New Zealanders (“our team of five million,” as she describes them) to buy into a lockdown so severe that even retrieving a lost cricket ball from a neighbor’s yard was banned.

Now her country, despite some early struggles with contact tracing, has largely conquered the virus, experiencing only 1,792 cases as of September10, far lower than many countries of comparable size.

For Angela Merkel, a scientist by training who has often been criticized as too rational, analytic, unemotional and cautious, the pandemic showed how these were exactly the strengths needed to help guide her country through the outbreak.

Since March, the German people have watched their “scientist in chief” (unlike a certain nation’s Commander in Chief) successfully navigate through uncertain times without the panic or frustration we have seen in so many other (male) leaders who have been unable to craft a way forward for their people or their economy.

So why have men and women leaders handled the pandemic in such different ways? Partially because they have different brains and they see the world through different lenses, leading to very opposing strategies for tackling this present invader called a virus.

About Andi Simon

Andi Simon, Ph.D. (www.andisimon.com), author of the upcoming book Rethink: Smashing the Myths of Women in Business, is a corporate anthropologist and founder of Simon Associates Management Consultants (www.simonassociates.net). A trained practitioner in Blue Ocean Strategy®, Simon has conducted several hundred workshops and speeches on the topic as well as consulted with a wide range of clients across the globe. She also is the author of the award-winning book On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights. Simon has a successful podcast, On the Brink with Andi Simon, that has more than 125,000 monthly listeners, and is ranked among the top 20 Futurist podcasts and top 200 business podcasts.

In addition, Global Advisory Experts named Simons’ firm the Corporate Anthropology Consultancy Firm of the Year in New York – 2020. She has been on Good Morning, America and Bloomberg, and is widely published in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Forbes, Business Week, Becker’s, and American Banker, among others. She has been a guest blogger for Forbes.com, Huffington Post, and Fierce Health.

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