Did countries with women leaders do better in curbing the Covid-19 pandemic?

The pandemic has seemed to exacerbate identity politics, as I've now seen many articles on the disproportionate effect of the pandemic on minorities (true), the fact that this reflects structural racism (dubious), and now at least six articles on how the countries that are doing better in fighting the pandemic are those run by women (I haven't done the stats, but certainly women-led countries seem to be among the best responders).

Here are three article on the latter issue: one from the increasingly woke New York Times, one from The Hill and one from Forbes (click on the screenshots to read). They offer a consistent thesis-female leadership has made a difference-but advance different possible reasons.

Forbes:

The underlying thesis of these articles, as I take it from most of the writing, is that women have characteristics that make them better leaders in a situation like this. Evaluating this thesis, one has to ask four questions:

1.) Is it true that countries with women leaders have done better than those with men leaders in fighting the coronavirus? That requires some kind of statistical analysis, for the analyses focus primarily on seven countries with female heads of state: Taiwan, New Zealand, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Iceland and Finland. And indeed, these countries have done better in fighting the virus than many others led by men. But there are other countries led by women as well, which are omitted from the analysis. Ideally, you'd want to do a rank order correlation between some measure of successful mitigation of the pandemic with whether the countries are led by women. Sadly, there are only 29 women-led countries in the world, and many have no data on coronavirus response.

But I would guess that yes, the countries above did do better than male-led countries. Note, though, that four of the seven are Scandinavian and two are islands. This leads to the question about whether it's the not qualities of the leaders themselves, but the geographical situation, which in the case of the small countries Iceland, New Zealand, and Taiwan, makes control easier, or whether the culture of those countries simultaneously is more receptive to women leaders and to a good governmental response to the virus, which might be the case in Scandinavia (see #2).

It's curious that the NYT says we shouldn't draw conclusions from a small sample, but then does so, concluding that women politicians are able to violate expected gender norms (aggression, etc.) more easily, being more "caring and thoughtful"; and that that kind of leadership can be really beneficial in situations like this one. Here's their caveat which they then proceed to violate.

We should resist drawing conclusions about women leaders from a few exceptional individuals acting in exceptional circumstances. But experts say that the women's success may still offer valuable lessons about what can help countries weather not just this crisis, but others in the future.

a. Do women have the better skills for this because of cultural influences (i.e., socialization/acculturation)? orb. Do women have better skills for this because their genetics (and evolution) have given them a propensity to behave differently from men?

In the end, if women's personality traits made them better at curbing the pandemic than did the traits of males (e.g., Trump's arrogance, domineering behavior, and unwilling to listen), then I think much of that difference is evolutionary. That would rankle the Control Left, however-and whether that difference be due to culture, genes, or an interacction between the two. In fact, if they admit that women are socialized to have the salubrious traits, that would go against their idea that we should not socialize people into having different gender roles (or we should socialize everyone to have "female" traits). And if they admit that some of the difference is based on genes and evolution, well, that puts them deeper into the Control Left swamp: the dreaded Evolutionary Psychology.

I'm of the different-behavior school, but not sure whether the differences were causal in mitigating the pandemic. If they were, then I think evolution played a role.

But are there also male qualities that would make men produce better responses in the face of some other challenges? Surely there must be some problems for which the male style of leadership would produce better results than the female style. If not, then one is forced into the rather unsavory position of saying: "Men and women are the same except when women are better", or, more permissively, "Men and women are different, but women's differences are always better for society."

As always, I invite readers to weigh in below.

h/t: cesar