The Asian Legacy of Female Leaders

In late summer, with a  huge majority of 234 votes from South Korean lawmakers in the country’s National Assembly, an impeachment motion was successfully filed against current President Park Guen-hye, and is currently pending in Korea’s Constitutional Court. This is hardly surprising, considering how the people of the Republic had poured onto the streets en masse demanding her resignation following the scandal that involved Choi Soon-sil, a long-time friend and religious adviser. President Park was convicted of passing on sensitive documents to Choi for approval and letting her religious mentor influence her decisions on national policies. Because of this relationship, Park Geun Hye was characterized as a puppet president lacking any real will-power. Some had even gone so far as to compare Choi Tae-Min, Choi Soon-Sil’s father and leader of the aforementioned religious cult, as the Korean Rasputin. Forbe’s most powerful woman in East Asia is, in fact, not so powerful at all.

It is painful to remember how, as Korea’s first female president, Park Geun Hye had once been heralded as an instigator of change in a notoriously patriarchal and conservative society. Sixty years old, highly educated and single, she was in many ways the model of a self-assured female politician. To quote an article published by CNN, “When she was elected last December, Park broke barriers in the patriarchal East Asian nation”. However, even without taking into account her uniquely submissive relationship with the Choi family, President Park also happened to be the orphaned daughter of Park Chung-hee, the military dictator who forty years ago changed his authoritarian state into a democracy and thus literally founded modern Korea, before being shot in 1979. In the 2012 elections, many older, conservative voters actually favored her over her opponents because of their loyalty to the ill-fated Park Chung-hee. “South Korea was her country, built by her father; the Blue House was her home; and the presidency was her family job”, wrote Jeon Yeou-ok, a former aide. During her time in office, President Park surrounded herself with many male aides and advisors like Mr. Jeon, who had much say in policy-making. Her political agenda in no way encompassed gender equality. Thus, with a female as head of the government, Korea’s National Assembly was still comprised of 83 percent male, and the country ranked 108th globally on the Gender Gap Index.

This example should serve as a wake-up call for those of us who believe that just because a traditionally patriarchal country chooses a woman for its head of government, gender issues are miraculously being resolved. Across Asia, examples of female leaders abound; President Park is part of a clique of daughters, wives and widows elected in the name of their deceased male predecessors, a clique which includes Sirimavo Bandaranaike and Chandrika Kumaranatunga of Sri Lanka, Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan, Corazon Aquino and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo of the Philippines, Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh and Indira Gandhi of India, just to name a few. Only last year in Myanmar, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, the youngest daughter of General Aung San, garnered 80% of the contested seats for her party, the National League of Democracy, after running a campaign that emphasized her feminine qualities of patience and morality, according to Southeast Asian gender expectations. Of course, this is not to put Ms. Suu Kyi, a Nobel laureate and staunch opponent of conservative militarism, on the same platform as President Park—however, their stories are, in many ways, eerily similar. Her father, the nationalist hero Aung San, is also regarded as the Father of Modern Myanmar, after winning the country’s independence from Great Britain. He was martyred in 1947 by a coup. When Suu Kyi first gave a public speech in 1989 at the Schewedagon Pagoda amidst political upheaval in Rangoon, it was under the portrait of general Aung San. One of her key rallying mottos?  “I could not, as my father’s daughter, remain indifferent to all that was going on.”

To be clear, the bottom line is not that all dynastic female leaders are incapable, powerless puppets acting in the interest of their male advisors. Indeed, many gradually proved to be driving forces for political and social change beneath their veneer of conformity. Yet the very fact that a woman in Asia cannot get along in the world of policy-making unless she is closely related to a prominent politician is a sad truth. If Asian advocates want to fight for a gender-equal future, more opportunities need to be created for talented, assertive women through a system of meritocracy. Only in that way will the deeply ingrained culture of misogyny be gradually reversed.