Gender, Crises, and Executive Leadership – A Comparative Case Study of Health Crises in Germany, New Zealand, and Liberia

This paper explores the impact crises have on the already common perception that executive leadership is a masculine domain. We argue that crises provide opportunities for women to exhibit their leadership capacity. These opportunities, however, are conditional. When crises produce gender role congruency for women leaders, their leadership is likely to be evaluated positively, enhancing their hold on political power. In contrast, crises can also create gender role incongruity for women leaders, exacerbating backlash and reinforcing the masculinization of executive office. To illustrate our claim, we focus on health crisis, a stereotypically feminine type, as it played out during COVID-19 in New Zealand and Germany and during the Ebola outbreak in Liberia. Utilizing a qualitative case study approach, drawing on news reports, parliamentary debates, public opinion polls, and expert interviews, we show that the coronavirus crisis allowed Ardern and Merkel to act consistent with gendered expectations of women’s leadership which explains their perception as effective crisis managers. Likewise, President Ellen Sirleaf Johnson’s response to the outbreak of the Ebola virus which ravaged Liberia and other West African nations between 2014-2016 allowed the Liberian President to act in ways consistent with gender stereotypes resulting in praise for her leadership. In addition, we show that these (dis)advantages for women leadership stem not from how well leaders actually respond to crisis but rather from how people perceive the leader’s performance.