Former Prime Ministers Encourage Female Leadership

Despite considerable challenges, women can be highly effective leaders, two female former prime ministers told a standing-room-only crowd at the Kennedy School of Government on Monday.

The Right Honorable A. Kim Campbell of Canada and the Right Honorable Jenny M. Shipley of New Zealand spoke about perceptions of female leadership and the leadership roles the two have taken on since retiring from politics.

Campbell and Shipley are two of only 32 living females who have served as president or prime minister. They focused on correcting what they said were misconceptions for female leadership and also discussed the obstacles they had to overcome as females running for political offices.

Campbell challenged the perception of women leaders as overstepping their bounds.

“Men, who have been doing the job for so long, act in a certain way when making decisions,” she said. “Women come along and have the same qualities because those are the qualities of the job. But women are seen as violating gender roles.”

Shipley also recounted gender-based attacks levied against her.

“I do remember when I first went into politics, one of my competitors asked me, ‘Well, Jenny Shipley, who’s looking after your children?’ I don’t think many of my male colleagues have faced a similar question,” she said.

Campbell said she felt that her initial campaign, although victorious, was adversely affected by popularly held beliefs.

“When I was running for the leadership of the party after being Minister of Justice and Attorney General, it was as if I had done nothing because no issues stuck to me,” she said.

Shipley partially blamed what she labeled a conservative media for popular misconceptions of female leaders, and Campbell cited former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as a target of such biased media.

“I don’t think that Margaret Thatcher was any more opinionated than any other leader. She was more qualified than anyone else at the time, but that wasn’t the media focus,” Campbell said.

Some negative views have dissipated since the two prime ministers’ elections, the pair said.

“In New Zealand, men and women would not take a party seriously if it did not have a good gender—and increasingly racial—mix,” Shipley said. “It’s not about being politically correct; it’s just who we are.”

Campbell said she saw her election as a beacon of hope for girls.

“After I won, I remember one of my campaign leaders in tears and saying, ‘This is for my daughter,’” she said.

The other major theme of the night’s discussion was the necessity of finding work to do after politics because of the finite length of political life.

“The first day you’re a leader is the beginning of the end of your political career,” Shipley said.

The two acknowledged that once defeated or otherwise retired from politics, one has to fall back on core beliefs to determine a meaningful course of action.

Campbell said she learned the lesson when her own Progressive Party was overwhelmingly defeated in 1993 after she served only three months in office.

“Political defeat throws you back onto who you are as a person,” she said. “You are forced to think about what it was that made you get into politics in the first place. There are all sorts of ways to use the skills you’ve learned to affect the issues you care about.”

Campbell said she now applies the abilities she gained as a political leader as deputy president of the Council of Madrid, an organization dedicated to aiding developing democracies. She also recently stepped down as the chair of the Council of World Women Leaders, which serves to remind the world that “women do lead, can lead and deserve a chance to lead,” according to Campbell.

Shipley currently works in Asia, which, in what she said was the necessary and inevitable process of globalization, will become the economic fulcrum of future decades. She chaired the Asia Pacific Economic Council in 1999 and will make a presentation on an Asian education initiative at the Boao Forum for Asia in Hainan Dao, China later this month.

Both Campbell and Shipley agreed that the efforts of former government officials are best concentrated in the international sphere.

“You can paint on a larger canvass” after finishing the term as a leader, rather than being bogged down in domestic issues, Shipley said. “There’s nothing so distasteful as an ‘ex’ chirping [about domestic issues].”

Shipley also stated a desire to stay out of the limelight.

“I’m not sure that it matters as much to women as to our male colleagues to have the public adulation and be on the public mind,” she said.