Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Kerry Howley links to this Bhutto interview with New York in which Bhutto kinda-sorta makes the argument that I made a few months ago, namely that just because she inherited the leadership of her party and became Prime Minister in a country that has high illiteracy and poor democratic institutions, doesn’t exactly mean that Pakistan is particularly far ahead as women’s rights/representation goes:

Q: Why do you think that the U.S. seems to have a harder time with women at the highest level of power than other countries?

A: In a country like Pakistan or India, when a charismatic leader dies, people are not sure that the traditions he symbolized will continue—there’s a lot of illiteracy and there isn’t the same access to information. So they tend to transfer allegiance from a male leader to a female descendant, in the hope that his policies will be continued. But in Westernized societies, it’s a little different, because people have greater education and greater access to information—they don’t have the same need to be sure of the message of the leader.

Howley argues that “electing a woman to the most visible high status position in a patriarchal society is a kind of social progress distinct from any particular policy she might support.”  I think that Pakistan is just about perfect proof that this argument isn’t true. Pakistan is weird because there’s a large section of the population that is (relatively) progressive gender-wise and highly educated, and thus had no problem supporting Bhutto.  On the other hand, in Pakistan, women can be sentenced to gang rape by a court of law. Pakistan is the best example to show that using the presence of a woman in the highest state office as a metric for women’s equality is misguided.