Since the start of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the relationship between national women leaders and their effectiveness in handling the COVID-19 crisis has received much media attention. This paper scrutinizes this association by considering income, demography, health infrastructure, gender norms, and other national characteristics and asks if women's leadership is associated with fewer COVID-19 cases and deaths in the first few months of the pandemic. The paper also examines differences in the policy responses of leaders by gender. Using a constructed dataset for 194 countries, it uses a variety of economic and sociodemographic variables to match nearest neighbors. The findings show that COVID-19 outcomes, especially deaths, are better in countries led by women and may be explained by the timing of lockdowns. The study uses insights from behavioral studies and leadership literature to speculate on the sources of these gender differences as well as on their implications.

HIGHLIGHTS

• COVID-19 offers a unique spotlight on the effectiveness of national leadership in crises.

• Little is known about how women versus men leaders manage national crises.

• Nearest-neighbor matching reveals women-led countries performed better in COVID-19 outcomes.

• Women leaders locked down their countries more quickly than their men-led neighbors.

• Women leaders also communicated in ways that were markedly different from men leaders.

自持续的冠状病毒大流行开始以来，各国女性领导人之间的关系及其在处理COVID-19危机中的有效性受到了媒体的广泛关注。本文通过考虑收入，人口统计，卫生基础设施，性别规范和其他国家特征来仔细研究这种联系，并询问妇女领导层是否与大流行前几个月的COVID-19病例和死亡人数减少有关。本文还按性别考察了领导人在政策应对方面的差异。使用针对194个国家的构建数据集，它使用各种经济和社会人口统计学变量来匹配最近的邻居。研究结果表明，在以妇女为首的国家中，COVID-19的结局，尤其是死亡情况要好得多，这可以用锁定时间来解释。

强调

• COVID-19提供了一个独特的焦点，可以说明国家领导层在危机中的有效性。

• 关于男女领导人如何处理国家危机的消息鲜为人知。

• 最近邻匹配显示，妇女主导的国家在COVID-19结果中的表现更好。

• 女领导人比男领导的邻居更快地封锁了自己的国家。

• 女领导人也以与男领导人明显不同的方式进行交流。