Women Leaders in the International Landscape

Abstract

AbstractChapter 10 offers an international lens to the largely domestic picture presented in The Woman President. The chapter responds to questions posed about how women leaders exercise power in the international landscape, whether gender influences a women leader’s response to her foreign policy responsibilities as well as how women leaders respond to each other on the world stage. These questions are largely unexplored in the existing literature. In seeking to provide some answers, the chapter begins by recalling the high visibility of women presidents and prime ministers on the global stage largely because of the low levels of female representation at this level. The chapter then considers how the four presidents exercised their foreign policy responsibilities, before turning its attention to the ways in which women leaders in the international landscape first speak as a collective, such as through the Council of Women World Leaders, second, speak for fellow women and finally speak for the ‘Asian woman’. While the chapter argues that gender was not accorded an explicit priority in articulated foreign policy goals, we simultaneously begin to understand how women leaders may be freer to prioritize gender equality in international dialogues when compared to what the domestic policy landscape may allow.