The COVID-19 crisis has a huge impact on everyone’s lives. Epidemics, wars, and revolutions have always changed the history of humankind as pointed out by renowned anthropologist Jared Diamond. The same is likely to happen this time. This pandemic forces us to face our vulnerability on a daily basis. We are in the midst of the biggest global crisis in the last 100 years. On the flip side, the new coronavirus exposed fake leaders by showing their inconsistency, incapacity, and irrelevance to solve the world’s problems. And, more importantly, it put a spotlight on the truly strong, resilient, and virtuous leaders that are making a positive difference for all of us.
I am happy to say, although not surprised, that a disproportional ratio of the strongest leaders who stood out positively during this unprecedented crisis are women, especially the young. This is not rhetoric: it is data. Specifically, I identified the 12 countries led by women with a population greater than 2 million and GDP per capita above US$ 2,000. Next, I selected a set of comparable countries in terms of population, GDP and geographic location. In the case of Sweden (Pop. of around 10 million), I added three countries led by women – Denmark, Finland and Norway – with a population of around 5 million each. The table below shows the ten comparison pairs.
For each group, I computed the number of deaths by COVID-19 until May 6th from worldometer.info and divided it by its total population.