Here’s to the next half-century – It’s taking a long time, but things are getting better

“WOMEN ARE NOT at the top anywhere,” says Herminia Ibarra, a professor at the INSEAD business school near Paris. “Many get on the high-potential list and then languish there for ever.” That is broadly true not only in business but also in politics, academia, law, medicine, the arts and almost any other field you care to mention.

In parliaments across the world women on average hold just 20% of the seats (see chart 6), though again the Nordics do much better. In Finland—one of the first countries to give them the vote, in 1906—women have at various times held more than half the ministerial jobs. The prime minister one back was a woman and so is the current president, Tarja Halonen, the first female to hold the post. A lawyer, doughty fighter for women’s rights and single mother, she is nearing the end of her second and final term of office but would like to see another woman president soon: “Once is not enough.” Elsewhere too female political leaders are becoming less unusual—think of Germany’s Angela Merkel, Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff, Australia’s Julia Gillard or Liberia’s Ellen Johnson Sirleaf—but still far from common.

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