Stats Of The Week: Women In Power (Or, Maybe Someday We’ll Be More Like Bangladesh)

In which countries have women held political leadership the longest?

By Brian Dalton on July 29, 2016 4:59 pm

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As Kathryn Rubino pointed out earlier this week, the United States is, globally speaking, hardly breaking new ground with the prospect of our first female president. In fact, 52 countries have already had a female head of government, according to the World Economic Forum Gender Gap Report 2015.

In many cases, though, those female leaders have held power only briefly. This chart below–a “datasketch” by Mona Chalabi of The Guardian U.S.–shows the states where women have led for the longest time period:

women heads of state