Leader gender, country culture, and the management of COVID‐19

• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Author: Valentina Dimitrova‐Grajzl,Janelle Gornick,Iyabo Obasanjo
• Date: 01 December 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/wmh3.547

Received: 13 December 2021

|

Revised: 20 May 2022

|

Accepted: 2 August 2022

DOI: 10.1002/wmh3.547

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Leader gender, country culture, and the

management of COVID‐19

Valentina Dimitrova‐Grajzl

1

|Janelle Gornick

2

|

Iyabo Obasanjo

3

1

Department of Economics and Business,

Virginia Military Institute, Lexington,

Virginia, USA

2

Department of Psychology, Virginia Military

Institute, Lexington, Virginia, USA

3

Department of Kinesiology & Health

Sciences, College of William and Mary,

Williamsburg, Virginia, USA

Correspondence

Valentina Dimitrova‐Grajzl, Department of

Economics and Business, Virginia Military

Institute, Lexington, VA 24450, USA.

Email: dimitrova-grajzlvp@vmi.edu

Abstract

As early as two months into the COVID‐19 pandemic,

popular media started reporting that women leaders,

compared to men leaders, were managing COVID‐19

better. This paper empirically examines the impact of

women leaders in managing pandemic health outcomes

one year after the onset of the pandemic. Further, we

consider leader effectiveness within the context of

country culture. We find that women's leadership is

indeed associated with better containment of the

pandemic. We also find that certain country‐level cultural

traits play a significant role in pandemic outcomes. More

hierarchical societies experience higher COVID‐19

cases and death. Individualistic cultures and masculine

cultures are associated with more deaths from the

pandemic. Some cultural traits modulate women's ability

to manage COVID‐19. Our findings have implications for

health policy and provide rationale for promoting gender

equity in political leadership.

KEYWORDS

COVID‐19, culture, women leaders

Key points

•Women's leadership is associated with better contain-

ment of the COVID‐19 pandemic.

•Certain cultural traits have an impact on pandemic

outcomes. Hierarchical societies have higher rates of

COVID‐19 cases and deaths. Individualistic cultures

and masculine cultures are associated with more

COVID‐19 deaths but not cases.

World Med. & Health Policy. 2022;14:773–797. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/wmh3

|

773

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial‐NoDerivs License, which

permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non‐commercial and no

modifications or adaptations are made.

© 2022 The Authors. World Medical & Health Policy published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Policy Studies Organization.

•The effect of women leaders on COVID‐19 rates and

deaths is modulated by cultural traits. More specifi-

cally, short‐term orientation and indulgent cultures

seem to boost women's effectiveness in tackling the

pandemic.

•The mechanism of how culture influences the effec-

tiveness of women leaders needs to be studied

further.

INTRODUCTION

As early as late spring 2020, popular media reported better management of the COVID‐19

pandemic in countries led by women as opposed to countries led by men. Headlines such as

“What Do Countries with the Best Coronavirus Responses Have in Common? Women

Leaders”from Forbes (Wittenberg‐Cox, 2020), and “Why are Women‐Led Nations Doing

Better with Covid‐19”from the New York Times (Taub, 2020) had the general population and

researchers deliberating the validity of such claims.

Researchers have taken up the challenge of empirically investigating the reported

association between women leaders and COVID‐19 health outcomes. Within‐country

analysis by Sergent and Stajkovic (2020) found that, as of May 2020, US states with women

governors had fewer COVID‐19 deaths per capita than those governed by men. On an

international level, researchers have found that countries with women leaders showed

reduced COVID‐19‐related deaths per capita and that women were more effective in

introducing the mitigating policy, such as country‐level shutdowns, mask mandates, and

contact tracing against COVID‐19 (Abras et al., 2021; Coscieme et al., 2020; Garikipati &

Kambhampati, 2021; Park, 2021).

However, the overall country culture also seems to affect COVID‐19 rates (Ibanez &

Sisodia, 2020; Mayer et al., 2020). Furthermore, researchers such as Windsor et al. (2020)

have concluded “women are able to attain national leadership positions in countries where

core cultural values reward traits often found in women leaders, such as a long‐term

orientation, a collectivist (rather than individualist) focus, and fewer power disparities in

society”(p. 2). Thus, it is important to consider and separate out country culture when

examining the specific, unique impact of women's leadership on pandemic outcomes. Very

few studies have evaluated the impact of both leader gender and country‐level cultural

variables on pandemic outcomes. So far, to our knowledge, Windsor et al. (2020) and

Garikipati and Kambhampati (2021) are the only researchers to include both leader gender

and some measure of culture or social norms when assessing COVID‐19 outcomes. The

results of each highlight the need to investigate this relationship further. Windsor et al.

(2020) found that including cultural level variables in their model reduced the association

between women's leadership and lower COVID‐19 death rate to a non‐statistically

significant trend. From this, they concluded that country‐level cultural values were

confounding the effect of women‐led countries having better COVID‐19 outcomes. However,

Garikipati and Kambhampati (2021) found support for the popular media claims while

accounting for a proxy for gender‐related cultural differences. They used nearest‐neighbor

matching to control for country‐level differences on the Gender Inequality Index, a proxy for

gender inequality in the context of health, educational attainment, political participation, and

labor market participation. Results showed that women‐led countries had lower death rates

from COVID‐19.

This paper contributes to the literature examining leaders’effectiveness, throug h

the lens of gender, in health policy and on community‐level health outcomes

774

|

DIMITROVA‐GRAJZL ET AL.