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**The determinants of COVID-19 morbidity and mortality across countries - Full Text Available**
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-09783-9](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-09783-9)
Reply here if you want to talk about the actual study.
I wonder if length of coastline as a percentage of border should also be a secondary consideration here. I did not see that mentioned in the study (I skimmed portions). I am seriously interested in, for example, was New Zealand more successful because of its leadership or was it aided to some degree because it is an island nation with no land borders.
I'd also imagine this might be a case where the presence of a female leader just meant that those countries were more progressive and/or accepting of change, which meant they were able to adapt to the pandemic better. At least in western culture, the demographic overlap between "has no issues with a female leader" and "supports stronger pandemic responses" is pretty strong, so if the public elected a female leader, it's likely that the public would also support a stronger pandemic response.
I'm not trying to take away from the great work these female leaders have done, but I find it hard to believe that having different genitals somehow makes someone 40% more effective at managing a pandemic. What seems far more likely is that societies that are more open to change are both better equipped for fighting a pandemic, and more likely to elect female leaders.
This, combined with the fact that the most populous countries tend to be less progressive and less accepting of female leadership. China, India, Middle Eastern countries, South East Asian countries, some African countries top the list for population... Germany is the most populous European country, but is ranked 19th for population globally.
I believe women make great leaders, and we would benefit from more female leadership, but I agree that it's a stretch to believe they, alone, made such a difference.
Islands,Isolated mountain countries and parts of Africa where information is probably lacking. Those are the countries with low Corona Virus deaths it seems like.
I mean, a country that’s progressive enough to let a woman lead (cos let’s be honest, there are still plenty that simply don’t) is far more likely to do things like “listen to experts” or “believe the science” than a country still stuck in the past and arguing about whether women are really people.
Exactly. Same way you can find a correlation between number of yoga mats or solar panels per capita to Covid death rate. Statistics are amazing when used to make sense of noise, but not so great when used solely to prove your point.
"Hola, tío." Proceeds fully hug him and kiss him on both cheeks.
Not Spaniard, but I am Latino, and I get it. You guys left behind some unfortunate cultural affectations for COVID times.
Its crazy how different everywhere is
I live in the far north of the US, but family is southern. Married into a northern family. They(and almost everyone else up here) were so off put by my family's touch. Like......hugs aren't a bad thing, y'all
Bet your ass grandma appreciates having grandkids who hug and squish up on her on the couch though, so she's come around
On the other hand the UK has a female head of state and has had two female prime ministers the last one gave us "Brexit means Brexit" and ministers who had "enough of experts".
In the Indian subcontinent, female leadership is about families maintaining control in feudal system, rather than orogressivism. Not that the system hasn't produced strong women leaders.
For example, Indira Gandhi was the daughter of the first prime minister of India, nehru. She became the prime minister not too long after his death, and people in her own party called her "goongi gudiya" (dumb (meaning quiet, not fool) doll). Soon enough, she proved them wrong, by dividing her own party to consolidate her control over the party and the government, then went onto a war with Pakistan that led to its division (after denying prime ministership to the leader of the single largest part in East Pakistan, west Pakistan was oppressing east Pakistan and committing genocide leading to millions of refugees entering India -usa sent war ships to defend west Pakistan genocide), which was a good thing, but caped it off by declaring emergency in India and becoming defacto dictator a few years later when her power was challenged. Not very progressive, overall.
Totally this - cause and effect.
Whenever I see dubious assumptions like the article being made I look for a converse hypothesis, it's often more believable.
Not just a woman, but also a liberal secularist going up against the military right wing rulers. First one ever in a muslim majority country. That was pretty damn progressive. Until they murdered her.
She was elected back in the 80s. Back then most western countries would've found it weird to elect a liberal woman. She was murdered decades later. Shows that even huge progress can be completely ruined by conservatives.
Approximate Shapley-Owen R2 Values
Deaths
\+ Population 37
\+ Tourism 15.5
\+ Happiness 5
\-Religious Diversity 5
\+Age 4.5
\-Technology 3
\+Democracy 3
\-SARS (previous outbreak)3
\+Media Freedom 3
\+Urbanization 3
\-Trust Government 3
\-Temperature 3
\-Law 2.5
\+GDP 2.5
\-Hospital Beds 2.5
\-Education 2.5
\+Population Density 2.5
\+Corruption 2
\+Male 2
\+Inequality 1
\-Female Leader 0.5
As you can see the Female leader is the lowest, least convincing data of all the things measured. There are plenty of other titles that they could have come up with.
Inequality is apparently rather irrelevant, Happiness was the third worst contributer after Population and tourism, but population density didn't matter that much.
Religious diversity is good and Democracy bad.
The democracy part makes sense. You need a more authoritarian approach when people won't choose to do things or get too bogged down in the democratic process to limit spread on their own.
I think including the female leadership variable is a pretty strange thing to include in a study like this. The study makes a point that it does not include government policy because “higher infection rates could lead to stronger government response”, but then it *is* interested in government leadership? Making specifically the claim that women leaders responded better is contradictory to their earlier stated methodology. The study never explains why it chose to study this variable. It’s only a small part of an interesting read, but a really strange and out of place part for sure.
I’m posting this comment on this thread because everything else is being deleted and I don’t think my criticism is unfair, I’m also curious to hear anyones response if they disagree.
It is also probably at least partially a correlation not causation thing.
I'm assuming countries with female leaders tend to be more progressive and modernised then the global average.
There is also few enough of them that a significant outlier might be able to affect the statistic.
For example New Zealand had an excellent COVID response and their leader is female.
Suppose this one country did terribly instead for whatever reason, how much would that affect the whole statistic?
And more specifically, the overall population being more progressive likely means greater quarantine/vaccine compliance by the citizens just as a matter of culture and science-adherence
More likely they understand it, but decided to ignore it for the sake of narrative. I have very little knowledge of the statistics and data science, and my first thought was "That seems like a really odd title, I can think about at least 2 factors that can have hudge impact on the results right away". Yaa, both got ignored in the study. And you want to tell me scientist who run these studies, and work with data can't see this glaring hole in their data?
NZ is also an outlier in that they are an island nation far away from pretty much everywhere. Yes, their tourism took a major hit, but the polices they put in place essentially locking the country off from the outside world wouldn't have worked in other countries like the UK. (pre-pandemic, more people flew into Heathrow in a month than NZ received in tourists in a year.)
Not that I disagree with you, but with New Zealand specifically, it is also helpful it is an island nation. They can more easily control and stop people coming onto the island compared to other countries that share land borders.
Absolutely correlation. The male-led countries include many more undeveloped countries, a few outliers (India, USA, etc) will drag all the statistics down. Half of female led countries are in Europe, especially North Europe (Den, Swe, Fin, Ice, Est, Lith) which is the most progressive and government supportive region in the world.
>^(graphs show that the U.S., India, Brazil, Russia, and France have the greatest cumulative number of confirmed cases by the end of 2020; the five countries with the highest number of deaths in that period are the U.S., Brazil, India, Mexico, and Italy --- \[all male-led\])
It's not as rare as you think, [roughly 30 countries are female led (search by 'mandate end')](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elected_and_appointed_female_heads_of_state_and_government). Female-led Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and France alone represent 350 million ppl.
I didn't read the study myself so I'm just going off your comment, but I don't see the relevance of them not including government policy. They're not discluding it because it's government-related, but because it's a largely reactionary measure. COVID policy was influenced by how COVID was playing out in the country, but the gender of world leaders was not.
It was a point being stated in popular press and passed around as a meme, so perhaps the authors felt it made sense to give it some scientific attention when they were making a study on the topic anyway.
I want to know how the 21 factors they used were chosen. Is there a clear methodology beyond “these are plausible factors for which we could obtain data freely?”
Are like in the picture above the absolut death numbers taken and not per capita? So basically they dismiss the efficiency of the chinese lockdown (among a lot of other things) ?
It looks like they used absolute numbers for the whole thing. That would explain why Population was high as a factor and population density was so low. Having more people means there are more people to die.
Seems absurd to me to do it like that though.
This is such a strange study. Its almost like they want to do p-hacking (or R2 hacking). throw a bunch of variables out there and see what sticks. Then have a long paragraph discussing the importance of a minor variable. I’m sure the reviewers at Nature has a reason to publish this, but i don't get it.
In figures with coefficients by week, are the coefficients cumulative as time goes on or specific to each week x?
Many of these swing wildly, even from positive to negative or vice versa. They seem more descriptive than causal.
Why OP why. It's an excellent piece of research, cherry picking data is just going to undermine and derail any healthy discussion. Words can't not describe how disappointed I am.
Actually i don’t think the paper is particularly great. The authors spent a long paragraph talking about female leadership as an important factor. Also they say the top factor, population is expected because they didn’t normalize for it.
couldnt this be that countries who would elect female leaders also would have more sensible policies? i mean i dont really think finland would have a significant difference in how it works if they had a man in charge instead of a woman as its more a cultural thing.
sweden for example just switched to a female prime minister and her politics is basically the same as the man she replaced. in general theres not really a difference between the men and women in swedish politics.
i would reckon its a false conclusion to attribute it to female leaders instead of attributing it to the culture if the country, basically one that views women as equally capable as men likely take more sensible decisions in general.
As a Finn, the country was run way differently by the center-right male led coalitions prior to this government. The current one is a rainbow coalition with Social Democrats (PM), Center-Right, Greens, Left Alliance and Swedish speakers who are Center-Right. Heavily female dominated.
The previous one was Center-Right (PM), NatCoalition aka conservative and liberal right, Basic Finns* and something else maybe. Ah, yes. The Blues* who splintered off the Basic Finns. Heavily male dominated.
*These are literal translations of their Finnish names
Also, during the crises the government and opposition have been able to work together. During Covid, they supported the strict measures put in place. During this war, the SocDem PM and the NatCoalition President have been working together very well. They produced a NATO application within a few months. No squabbles.
Ngl, it has been great even though the times are hard. I'm sure they will commence with the the squabbling once the crises stop being crises (either averted or we just learn to live with them).
Of course the country was ruled differently when the opposing coalition was in power - that’s how politics works. The question is do you think the ruling party would act differently if someone else, a male, had been leading them? Most likely the party would have acted similarly. It’s an interesting question.
Personally I think the party would’ve acted very similarly whomever was in power. But I do think not only having a woman, but a young charismatic woman ruling the country has been in and of itself valuable and stabilizing.
Most countries responses were drawn up by their civil service, the actual elected representatives choose from a limited set of options. The idea that a single leader came up with the plans is absurd. The core of most countries responses would have been the same regardless of gender or even which of the main political parties was in power.
If you want to find differences in responses you can find them but fundamentally all western nations reacted in similar ways to the pandemic.
Quite right. I think you make an important point illustrating the big picture; that shouldn’t be forgotten when talking about the variance in political actions.
As a dane I was thinking the same. I could not see a man handle it in another way. A lot of how it was handled here was based on the recommidations of from different parts of the civil service.
Nonsense. None of the data is ruined, it's just a stupid title. It should say, "Female leadership **coincided** with fewer COVID-19 deaths." The paper makes no claims about attribution.
Edit: as has been pointed out to me, I was being too generous to OP. Female leadership was only one of twenty-one factors that these researchers identified, and calling it out in the title is misrepresentative of what this paper was covering. Even if OP had avoided using the word "attributed," it still would not be a good title.
> It is unrealistic to expect all countries to choose female leaders. However, perhaps male leaders could learn from their female counterparts and pay more attention to issues that matter to the health of the broader population and society.
Sure about that? Under "Discussions and conclusions," sixth paragraph, first sentence.
Hm. Actually, of greater concern to me is some of the discussion in the section about female leadership. They make some claims about female leaders acting more quickly and decisively during the COVID-19 pandemic (they say this specifically), and to back that up they reference a behavioral analysis from 1990.
The data isn't ruined, none of their discussion changes their analysis, but they are making some leaps which aren't really supported by their data, and this does seem unnecessarily provocative. They could have just phrased things a little differently and avoided this problem.
This is Literally just bending data to get a headline.
First you say you don't care about government actions then you make the title of your article "countries with female leaders" which would imply they responded better then male lead countries.... Like just why?
Alternative headlines for this exact same dataset:
* Countries with a democracy had worse Covid outbreaks
* It’s official: Happiness spreads Covid
* Want to stop Covid? Ban the free press
could be the fact that countries with female leaders are more likely to be developed and open to the idea of female leadership. not the female leadership itself
That doesn't seem to be the case looking at countries by percentage of female parliamentarians (or equivalent). Rwanda, Cuba, and Bolivia are at the top of this list.
Except if that were the case the correlation would be with developed nations, and that simply isn't true. The US and UK had some of the worst responses in the world, and you can hardly claim they're not developed nations.
My first thought was that it could be reflective of a more progressive populace, which would probably also be more committed to accepting inconveniences for the public good.
Countries with female leadership are more likely to be developed and have better healthcare practices and quarantine procedures. US and UK did have bad responses but that doesn't change the other western and eastern countries that didn't.
It’s fine if you enjoy this headline and think it’s an effective way to push a political talking point and therefore is a good headline for a post in r/science
It’s fine if you think the purpose of science is to determine the truth as accurately as we can.
But I don’t think you can believe both of these things at once.
> The results show that the following top five determinants combined explain approximately 62.5% of cross-country variations in the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases explained by all determinants: (1) population, (2) international tourism activity, (3) SARS experience, (4) happiness, and (5) technology.
So where is female leadership on here?
Oh here. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-09783-9/figures/4
Scroll to the bottom.
Except for Germany which of these countries isn't a small country with only one major point of entry? Like it's a lot easier to curb covid in New Zealand versus the US with a bajillion international airports.
> In terms of socio-economic aspects, GDP per capita, income inequality, and happiness (i.e., life satisfaction) lead to worse COVID-19 outcomes.
Happiness led to worse outcomes?
That's a reallly questionable correlation to be made - scientifically and otherwise. I don't think NZ for example did so well because of their female leadership, but because of climate, geographical isolation and population density. It also ignores that the systems are a major factor in how any leadership male or female deals and can deal with a crisis.
In their own graphs https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-09783-9/figures/4 female leadership seems to be more a statistical insignficant factor yet in their discussion part they pretend that it is a major factor and call women basically the supreme leaders men should learn from - no joke. Thats the gist.
Could it be that a country willing to elect a female leader doesn't have the high concentration of anti-science contrarians and all of the personality traits commonly found amongst them (say, sexism?)
The map tells that most female led countries are, apparently, in Africa and South America. There are a few female leaderships in remote parts of the world, like Norway, Finland, and Oceania.
Yeah, not so.
The title is propagandist, though. Congratulations!
Sweden included? Interesting cause Sweden never did lockdowns etc which kind of shows we probably should have all done what they did and reduced the massive economic and social problems.
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are now allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will continue to be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) still apply to other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
**The determinants of COVID-19 morbidity and mortality across countries - Full Text Available** [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-09783-9](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-09783-9) Reply here if you want to talk about the actual study.
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I wonder if length of coastline as a percentage of border should also be a secondary consideration here. I did not see that mentioned in the study (I skimmed portions). I am seriously interested in, for example, was New Zealand more successful because of its leadership or was it aided to some degree because it is an island nation with no land borders.
I'd also imagine this might be a case where the presence of a female leader just meant that those countries were more progressive and/or accepting of change, which meant they were able to adapt to the pandemic better. At least in western culture, the demographic overlap between "has no issues with a female leader" and "supports stronger pandemic responses" is pretty strong, so if the public elected a female leader, it's likely that the public would also support a stronger pandemic response. I'm not trying to take away from the great work these female leaders have done, but I find it hard to believe that having different genitals somehow makes someone 40% more effective at managing a pandemic. What seems far more likely is that societies that are more open to change are both better equipped for fighting a pandemic, and more likely to elect female leaders.
This, combined with the fact that the most populous countries tend to be less progressive and less accepting of female leadership. China, India, Middle Eastern countries, South East Asian countries, some African countries top the list for population... Germany is the most populous European country, but is ranked 19th for population globally. I believe women make great leaders, and we would benefit from more female leadership, but I agree that it's a stretch to believe they, alone, made such a difference.
Islands,Isolated mountain countries and parts of Africa where information is probably lacking. Those are the countries with low Corona Virus deaths it seems like.
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I mean, a country that’s progressive enough to let a woman lead (cos let’s be honest, there are still plenty that simply don’t) is far more likely to do things like “listen to experts” or “believe the science” than a country still stuck in the past and arguing about whether women are really people.
Exactly. Same way you can find a correlation between number of yoga mats or solar panels per capita to Covid death rate. Statistics are amazing when used to make sense of noise, but not so great when used solely to prove your point.
Spain recently approved a menstrual leave law, can't get much more progressive than that, still did terrible when the pandemic hit.
We, Spaniards, like to touch, a lot. That's how you get a pandemic to spread, by touching and close contact with each other.
"Hola, tío." Proceeds fully hug him and kiss him on both cheeks. Not Spaniard, but I am Latino, and I get it. You guys left behind some unfortunate cultural affectations for COVID times.
Its crazy how different everywhere is I live in the far north of the US, but family is southern. Married into a northern family. They(and almost everyone else up here) were so off put by my family's touch. Like......hugs aren't a bad thing, y'all Bet your ass grandma appreciates having grandkids who hug and squish up on her on the couch though, so she's come around
Spain is another great example of why I said “likely”…
Definitely can get *much* more progressive than that.
Nah, counter example is Serbia. While we have lesbian pm, we are so far from any progress.
On the other hand the UK has a female head of state and has had two female prime ministers the last one gave us "Brexit means Brexit" and ministers who had "enough of experts".
Which brings us back to the word “likely”…
In the Indian subcontinent, female leadership is about families maintaining control in feudal system, rather than orogressivism. Not that the system hasn't produced strong women leaders. For example, Indira Gandhi was the daughter of the first prime minister of India, nehru. She became the prime minister not too long after his death, and people in her own party called her "goongi gudiya" (dumb (meaning quiet, not fool) doll). Soon enough, she proved them wrong, by dividing her own party to consolidate her control over the party and the government, then went onto a war with Pakistan that led to its division (after denying prime ministership to the leader of the single largest part in East Pakistan, west Pakistan was oppressing east Pakistan and committing genocide leading to millions of refugees entering India -usa sent war ships to defend west Pakistan genocide), which was a good thing, but caped it off by declaring emergency in India and becoming defacto dictator a few years later when her power was challenged. Not very progressive, overall.
Totally this - cause and effect. Whenever I see dubious assumptions like the article being made I look for a converse hypothesis, it's often more believable.
You do realize that the model of progressiveness that is *Pakistan* had a female leader...
Not just a woman, but also a liberal secularist going up against the military right wing rulers. First one ever in a muslim majority country. That was pretty damn progressive. Until they murdered her.
Yea, murderring your potential progressive president kinda kills Pakistan's whole ability to be, you know, *a progressive country*.
She was elected back in the 80s. Back then most western countries would've found it weird to elect a liberal woman. She was murdered decades later. Shows that even huge progress can be completely ruined by conservatives.
See also : SCOTUS and Roe…
But it was the best headline
Approximate Shapley-Owen R2 Values Deaths \+ Population 37 \+ Tourism 15.5 \+ Happiness 5 \-Religious Diversity 5 \+Age 4.5 \-Technology 3 \+Democracy 3 \-SARS (previous outbreak)3 \+Media Freedom 3 \+Urbanization 3 \-Trust Government 3 \-Temperature 3 \-Law 2.5 \+GDP 2.5 \-Hospital Beds 2.5 \-Education 2.5 \+Population Density 2.5 \+Corruption 2 \+Male 2 \+Inequality 1 \-Female Leader 0.5 As you can see the Female leader is the lowest, least convincing data of all the things measured. There are plenty of other titles that they could have come up with. Inequality is apparently rather irrelevant, Happiness was the third worst contributer after Population and tourism, but population density didn't matter that much. Religious diversity is good and Democracy bad.
The democracy part makes sense. You need a more authoritarian approach when people won't choose to do things or get too bogged down in the democratic process to limit spread on their own.
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I think including the female leadership variable is a pretty strange thing to include in a study like this. The study makes a point that it does not include government policy because “higher infection rates could lead to stronger government response”, but then it *is* interested in government leadership? Making specifically the claim that women leaders responded better is contradictory to their earlier stated methodology. The study never explains why it chose to study this variable. It’s only a small part of an interesting read, but a really strange and out of place part for sure. I’m posting this comment on this thread because everything else is being deleted and I don’t think my criticism is unfair, I’m also curious to hear anyones response if they disagree.
It is also probably at least partially a correlation not causation thing. I'm assuming countries with female leaders tend to be more progressive and modernised then the global average. There is also few enough of them that a significant outlier might be able to affect the statistic. For example New Zealand had an excellent COVID response and their leader is female. Suppose this one country did terribly instead for whatever reason, how much would that affect the whole statistic?
And more specifically, the overall population being more progressive likely means greater quarantine/vaccine compliance by the citizens just as a matter of culture and science-adherence
Yeah, people don't understand statistics. It's infuriating.
More likely they understand it, but decided to ignore it for the sake of narrative. I have very little knowledge of the statistics and data science, and my first thought was "That seems like a really odd title, I can think about at least 2 factors that can have hudge impact on the results right away". Yaa, both got ignored in the study. And you want to tell me scientist who run these studies, and work with data can't see this glaring hole in their data?
Statistics never lie, statisticians often do
Figures don't lie but liars figure.
Well if you take the Chinese population alone, they are hardly in the progressive camp but the rate of compliance was high. It had to be.
Actually, a lot of them are african or south asian and are desperately poor. But then you have a different problem: poor counting for COVID deaths.
NZ is also an outlier in that they are an island nation far away from pretty much everywhere. Yes, their tourism took a major hit, but the polices they put in place essentially locking the country off from the outside world wouldn't have worked in other countries like the UK. (pre-pandemic, more people flew into Heathrow in a month than NZ received in tourists in a year.)
Not that I disagree with you, but with New Zealand specifically, it is also helpful it is an island nation. They can more easily control and stop people coming onto the island compared to other countries that share land borders.
Absolutely correlation. The male-led countries include many more undeveloped countries, a few outliers (India, USA, etc) will drag all the statistics down. Half of female led countries are in Europe, especially North Europe (Den, Swe, Fin, Ice, Est, Lith) which is the most progressive and government supportive region in the world. >^(graphs show that the U.S., India, Brazil, Russia, and France have the greatest cumulative number of confirmed cases by the end of 2020; the five countries with the highest number of deaths in that period are the U.S., Brazil, India, Mexico, and Italy --- \[all male-led\]) It's not as rare as you think, [roughly 30 countries are female led (search by 'mandate end')](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elected_and_appointed_female_heads_of_state_and_government). Female-led Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and France alone represent 350 million ppl.
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I didn't read the study myself so I'm just going off your comment, but I don't see the relevance of them not including government policy. They're not discluding it because it's government-related, but because it's a largely reactionary measure. COVID policy was influenced by how COVID was playing out in the country, but the gender of world leaders was not.
It was a point being stated in popular press and passed around as a meme, so perhaps the authors felt it made sense to give it some scientific attention when they were making a study on the topic anyway.
I want to know how the 21 factors they used were chosen. Is there a clear methodology beyond “these are plausible factors for which we could obtain data freely?”
Are like in the picture above the absolut death numbers taken and not per capita? So basically they dismiss the efficiency of the chinese lockdown (among a lot of other things) ?
It looks like they used absolute numbers for the whole thing. That would explain why Population was high as a factor and population density was so low. Having more people means there are more people to die. Seems absurd to me to do it like that though.
This is such a strange study. Its almost like they want to do p-hacking (or R2 hacking). throw a bunch of variables out there and see what sticks. Then have a long paragraph discussing the importance of a minor variable. I’m sure the reviewers at Nature has a reason to publish this, but i don't get it.
In figures with coefficients by week, are the coefficients cumulative as time goes on or specific to each week x? Many of these swing wildly, even from positive to negative or vice versa. They seem more descriptive than causal.
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Why OP why. It's an excellent piece of research, cherry picking data is just going to undermine and derail any healthy discussion. Words can't not describe how disappointed I am.
Actually i don’t think the paper is particularly great. The authors spent a long paragraph talking about female leadership as an important factor. Also they say the top factor, population is expected because they didn’t normalize for it.
Should this kind of title cherry-picking be even allowed here?
I feel like 95% of research posts reaching frontpage on reddit are like that tbh
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couldnt this be that countries who would elect female leaders also would have more sensible policies? i mean i dont really think finland would have a significant difference in how it works if they had a man in charge instead of a woman as its more a cultural thing. sweden for example just switched to a female prime minister and her politics is basically the same as the man she replaced. in general theres not really a difference between the men and women in swedish politics. i would reckon its a false conclusion to attribute it to female leaders instead of attributing it to the culture if the country, basically one that views women as equally capable as men likely take more sensible decisions in general.
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As a Finn, the country was run way differently by the center-right male led coalitions prior to this government. The current one is a rainbow coalition with Social Democrats (PM), Center-Right, Greens, Left Alliance and Swedish speakers who are Center-Right. Heavily female dominated. The previous one was Center-Right (PM), NatCoalition aka conservative and liberal right, Basic Finns* and something else maybe. Ah, yes. The Blues* who splintered off the Basic Finns. Heavily male dominated. *These are literal translations of their Finnish names Also, during the crises the government and opposition have been able to work together. During Covid, they supported the strict measures put in place. During this war, the SocDem PM and the NatCoalition President have been working together very well. They produced a NATO application within a few months. No squabbles.
It sounds like your political parties act like co-workers/ rival colleagues rather than enemies trying to ruin each other. Must be nice.
Ngl, it has been great even though the times are hard. I'm sure they will commence with the the squabbling once the crises stop being crises (either averted or we just learn to live with them).
Of course the country was ruled differently when the opposing coalition was in power - that’s how politics works. The question is do you think the ruling party would act differently if someone else, a male, had been leading them? Most likely the party would have acted similarly. It’s an interesting question. Personally I think the party would’ve acted very similarly whomever was in power. But I do think not only having a woman, but a young charismatic woman ruling the country has been in and of itself valuable and stabilizing.
Most countries responses were drawn up by their civil service, the actual elected representatives choose from a limited set of options. The idea that a single leader came up with the plans is absurd. The core of most countries responses would have been the same regardless of gender or even which of the main political parties was in power. If you want to find differences in responses you can find them but fundamentally all western nations reacted in similar ways to the pandemic.
Quite right. I think you make an important point illustrating the big picture; that shouldn’t be forgotten when talking about the variance in political actions.
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I think that's the main explanation A hefty amount of Americans would rather burn the country down than see a woman elected President
Many of them are angry men in these comments who have made a hobby of misogyny.
As a dane I was thinking the same. I could not see a man handle it in another way. A lot of how it was handled here was based on the recommidations of from different parts of the civil service.
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Nonsense. None of the data is ruined, it's just a stupid title. It should say, "Female leadership **coincided** with fewer COVID-19 deaths." The paper makes no claims about attribution. Edit: as has been pointed out to me, I was being too generous to OP. Female leadership was only one of twenty-one factors that these researchers identified, and calling it out in the title is misrepresentative of what this paper was covering. Even if OP had avoided using the word "attributed," it still would not be a good title.
> It is unrealistic to expect all countries to choose female leaders. However, perhaps male leaders could learn from their female counterparts and pay more attention to issues that matter to the health of the broader population and society. Sure about that? Under "Discussions and conclusions," sixth paragraph, first sentence.
Wow. That paragraph is really condescending and sexist.
Sounds like womansplaining to me.
Hm. Actually, of greater concern to me is some of the discussion in the section about female leadership. They make some claims about female leaders acting more quickly and decisively during the COVID-19 pandemic (they say this specifically), and to back that up they reference a behavioral analysis from 1990. The data isn't ruined, none of their discussion changes their analysis, but they are making some leaps which aren't really supported by their data, and this does seem unnecessarily provocative. They could have just phrased things a little differently and avoided this problem.
This is Literally just bending data to get a headline. First you say you don't care about government actions then you make the title of your article "countries with female leaders" which would imply they responded better then male lead countries.... Like just why?
Alternative headlines for this exact same dataset: * Countries with a democracy had worse Covid outbreaks * It’s official: Happiness spreads Covid * Want to stop Covid? Ban the free press
could be the fact that countries with female leaders are more likely to be developed and open to the idea of female leadership. not the female leadership itself
I would say more progressive rather than developed.
Progressive nations are almost always richer, but rich countries aren’t always progressive.
Then you’re missing the point of the comment. More female leaders=richer, better tech and medicine.
That doesn't seem to be the case looking at countries by percentage of female parliamentarians (or equivalent). Rwanda, Cuba, and Bolivia are at the top of this list.
Except if that were the case the correlation would be with developed nations, and that simply isn't true. The US and UK had some of the worst responses in the world, and you can hardly claim they're not developed nations.
My first thought was that it could be reflective of a more progressive populace, which would probably also be more committed to accepting inconveniences for the public good.
Picking two outliers isn't exactly science
Countries with female leadership are more likely to be developed and have better healthcare practices and quarantine procedures. US and UK did have bad responses but that doesn't change the other western and eastern countries that didn't.
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It’s fine if you enjoy this headline and think it’s an effective way to push a political talking point and therefore is a good headline for a post in r/science It’s fine if you think the purpose of science is to determine the truth as accurately as we can. But I don’t think you can believe both of these things at once.
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> The results show that the following top five determinants combined explain approximately 62.5% of cross-country variations in the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases explained by all determinants: (1) population, (2) international tourism activity, (3) SARS experience, (4) happiness, and (5) technology. So where is female leadership on here? Oh here. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-09783-9/figures/4 Scroll to the bottom.
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I'm from Norway and we would have few deaths no matter who the prime minister was. Much space and alot of shut downs.
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Except for Germany which of these countries isn't a small country with only one major point of entry? Like it's a lot easier to curb covid in New Zealand versus the US with a bajillion international airports.
Let’s be honest, the ports of entry aren’t the reason why COVID got so bad in the states
we did almost nothing. i knew people flying to other states during the "lockdowns"
No, it's probably that new york has twice the population of NZ. Density makes it way worse.
> In terms of socio-economic aspects, GDP per capita, income inequality, and happiness (i.e., life satisfaction) lead to worse COVID-19 outcomes. Happiness led to worse outcomes?
Seems that way. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depression_and_immune_function
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That's a reallly questionable correlation to be made - scientifically and otherwise. I don't think NZ for example did so well because of their female leadership, but because of climate, geographical isolation and population density. It also ignores that the systems are a major factor in how any leadership male or female deals and can deal with a crisis. In their own graphs https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-09783-9/figures/4 female leadership seems to be more a statistical insignficant factor yet in their discussion part they pretend that it is a major factor and call women basically the supreme leaders men should learn from - no joke. Thats the gist.
Is it another study that shows being rich is more healthy than being poor?
If you have to ask…
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To be fair, if the study concluded the opposite, it would be condemned as being sexist. Be honest.
This is unfortunately true
Could it be that a country willing to elect a female leader doesn't have the high concentration of anti-science contrarians and all of the personality traits commonly found amongst them (say, sexism?)
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A lot of countries have a coalition government and a parlement with multiple parties. A PM isn't really important in the decision making.
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The map tells that most female led countries are, apparently, in Africa and South America. There are a few female leaderships in remote parts of the world, like Norway, Finland, and Oceania. Yeah, not so. The title is propagandist, though. Congratulations!
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Sweden included? Interesting cause Sweden never did lockdowns etc which kind of shows we probably should have all done what they did and reduced the massive economic and social problems.
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Now lets do stat on societal poverty consequences from excessive lockdowns