Little Latvia has something to teach the great United States of America about presidential politics. Namely, that electing a woman as president is no big deal. It was not back in 1999, when Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga became the first female president, and it was not in 2014, when Laimdota Straujuma became the first female prime minister. (Latvia has a parliamentary system, so there is a head of state and a head of government.) Though born in Latvia, I had lived decades in the States by the time both of these events occurred. But I knew enough about both countries to be able to spot two reasons why this might be so: (1) the gender gap was not quite as large in Latvia and (2) the prevailing attitude among Latvians the world over was that women could do whatever men did. And could succeed—or fail—to the same degree.
The gender gap can be measured objectively. The Global Gender Gap Report, for instance, is based on data collected from 130 countries, or over 93 percent of the world’s population, in four broad areas: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment and health and survival. With no country obtaining anywhere near the combined score needed to indicate complete women’s equality (1.0), the most recent findings (2014) show that Iceland comes the closest (0.8594). And that Latvia (0.7691) fares a bit better than the States (0.7463). Curious to see what that says about political outcomes, I linked the scores to a list of women world leaders. Apart from President Borjana Krišto of Bosnia Herzegovina and President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, for whom data were not available, all the women came from nations scoring above 0.6:
0.8594 Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, Iceland
0.8453 Prime Minister Mari Johanna Kiviniemi, Finland
0.8453 President Tarja Halonen, Finland
0.7850 President Mary McAleese, Ireland
0.7798 President Doris Leuthard, Switzerland
0.7780 Chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany
0.7409 Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Australia
0.7208 President Dalia Grybauskaitė, Lithuania
0.7165 President Laura Chinchilla, Costa Rica
0.7154 Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar, Trinidad Tobago
0.7075 Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor, Croatia
0.6974 President Roza Otunbayeva, Kyrgyzstan
0.6973 Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh
0.6806 Prime Minister Iveta Radičová, Slovakia
0.6455 President Pratibha Patil, India
Attitudes are harder to quantify. But I am fairly certain that I was not unique among Latvians everywhere in feeling empowered as a female from my very first days. This empowerment came from my maternal grandmother, who was responsible for my day-to-day care. Born in 1879, she was able to figure out how to support her remaining family after her husband was executed by Russian revolutionaries and she had to return to Rīga, pregnant with her second child, accompanied by my mother, who was only a toddler, and bags of worthless rubles: she set up her own sausage stand and, later, turned a seaside resort into a resounding success. It come from my mother, who worked outside the home all her adult life. Born in the 1915, she managed to land a good job after we fled to Austria to escape the invading Red Army and then assumed the role of sole breadwinner when my father, after falling the equivalent of several stories at the hydroelectric plant where he had found work, decided that it might be best to study law in Innsbruck instead. And it came from my father, as well. He grew up with two accomplished sisters on a farm Cēsis and was equally proud of the one who became a farmer’s wife and the one who became a dentist. The latter, similar to what my mother did in Austria, became the primary provider not long after she and her husband fled to England. While she was able to establish her own practice in London, her husband, who had served as a judge in Latvia, could only find factory work. Which was not only unsuitable but also became a tax liability. So he quit to manage her practice. And both were fine with that.
I am constantly amazed by how many native-born American women my own age do not feel similarly empowered by their predecessors. However, I am truly heartened by what I hear from those born several decades later. For whatever reason, they have managed to instill the No-Big-Deal attitude in this electoral cycle. While most want to see a female president soon, they are also unwilling to say that it has to occur this particular year and be this particular front-runner. Even—or perhaps particularly—many feminists. So, according to a New York Times piece, some 87 percent of likely primary voters aged 18 to 29 say that they would vote for Bernie Sanders compared with only 13 percent for Hillary Clinton. As a woman quoted in an LA Times piece says, “Feminists choosing her just because she is a woman is the opposite of what feminism means. A ‘person’ should be elected by their records, not their gender.” So, there seems to be substantial progress.
It is important for the electorate to reach the point where gender no longer takes center stage. Not only so that more women are willing to run for office, confident that they had a fighting chance, but also that this could elevate the level of political discourse. As John Cassidy wrote in a piece in The New Yorker, “One of Hillary Clinton’s problems is that her campaign is largely about her. Sanders, on the other hand, seeks to inspire people with an uplifting theme.” And Clinton has claimed that this is so because she is a woman. If we were at the point where it was not always about gender, Clinton might show us what a remarkable leader she could be. On the other hand, very few have matched the “uplifting theme” marking President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. And racial inequality in the States is clearly greater than gender inequality. And many of the world leaders listed above had to contend with greater gender inequality than either Latvians or Americans endured. So maybe the best that Clinton can do is to make the presidential bid about herself. But then, at least, we would know.