WHERE ARE ALL THE WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP?

WHILST MAN-KIND HOLDS THE POWER TO DOMINATE US ALL, WE WILL ALWAYS BE WALKING THROUGH CONSECUTIVE CYCLES OF DESTRUCTION! POST NO.23/IN (A 10 minute read) 

Hello again readers, so lovely to have your attention again today (if that be the case)! I have a hazy sky outside today and a handful of hours at peace with myself which I shall use in the best way that I FEEL I can do. Talk, write and share, if only virtually for now. So readers, any comments would be very welcome indeed!

Having failed once more to successfully upload my finished manuscript of ON THE INSIDE LOOKING OUT, my patience had been absolutely worn down to a point of complete FRAZZLEDOM! I set to the task again and hope that this time I can get the process right as this is really getting me down. None the less, I shall continue my review of the book and today I am on chapter twenty which is titled, IT IS ALL ABOUT POWER!

I begin by quoting myself from this chapter:

Yes, it is all about power, this war is all about power! Political power, financial power, supply power and of course, energetical power! We are all finding out just how much we depend on Mr. Russia for much of our gas, oil and petrol. Russia´s modern wealth is built upon its production of these energy sources and the consequent sale and distribution to much of the world.

As soon as the Allied sanctions were placed, straight away the financial effect was felt by us here in Spain with a significant rise in the cost of both gas and petrol. We were asked to be as frugal as possible with our usage of gas and keep our homes at a moderate 19ºC!

Well, those who are reading and considering my words carefully, will remember how I longed for the temperature in my home to actually reach 19ºC for the first time since November of last year! At long last that day has come and gone! Or to be more precise, those two days have come and gone!

There were two days when my thermometer read 19ºC. The 10th and 11th of May to be exact. From there the temperature jumped to 21ºC for the next week and the following week, then jumped another 2º to 23ºC, which is where I am at now on the 29th May. Now we have the swing in the opposite direction and the new challenge is to keep cool! End of quote.

Yes, this as I see things, is the greatest challenge that we all have wherever we live on planet Earth. How to cope with the weather extremes? Survival is always about just that. How do we cope with our circumstances and situations? The fittest of the fit shall survive as I say frequently but in what conditions and under what conditions, that is the crux of this?

At this moment in time, my indoor thermometer is reading 25ºC. Fabulous! It has been that way for the last six weeks and my stepping into the comfortable zone did happen some six weeks earlier this year. Our global warming is so tragically being in part, physically beneficial for some of us who are living with very little money to spare for fuel!

Fuel poverty as it is known now by its very own name. Are you fuel impoverished? YES! I AM! Meaning that I cannot afford to pay for the quantity of fuel that I would ideally like to use in order to heat my home to a liveable standard. The consequence of that is of course, much suffering over winter. Piling on the layers of clothing and walking around the home dressed as thickly as a polar bear.

Because yes, hard as it may be for you all to believe that in sunny, southern Spain this should be so but it is the truth my friends. The buildings are so poorly designed and built that yes, they resist the heat wonderfully well. I am now benefitting from that with the temperatures outdoors being a full 10ºC higher than indoors without any air conditioning just open windows!

Therefore, the fact that it was the beginning of April when my thermometer hit 19ºC this year, well, YES! I have certainly made a mental note of that change  but it has spared me six weeks of Arctic indoor sensations!! Those who live outdoors though, have no respite from the conditions be they high or low!

With man-kind taking the lead on behalf of us all, we are beginning at last, to wake up to the reality which is ours. We have all been going down the wrong paths always! It is time to back track! Yep! Just like me. You have got to go back and clear up your tracks behind you, you cannot keep running blindly forward down a dead-end street.

I have mentioned many times that here in Spain we have 65% of our government made up of females and they have really made their prescence felt in these last four years. There really has been a feel of proper politics going down. The differences in how females do politics and how males have ever done politics, is dramatic.

The females are there for real, they are there to work on behalf of the citizens of their country. They are aware that they too are citizens of that nation. Even as we went into our respective lock-downs at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I asked myself, would all of this have got so out of control if we had female leaders in every nation! 

The then PM of my birth nation Gran Bretaña Boris Johnson, was quoted as saying, "Let the bodies pile high!" On the other side of life, Mrs. Angela Merkel the then leader of Germany, was shedding tears and refusing point blank to accept the massive loss of life and allow Christmas festivities to take place. She was resolute. Human life must come first!! I quote myself again from this chapter:

So, how do we stand as females in leadership around the world right now in 2022. When the COVID-19 outbreak got underway at the beginning of 2020, I made a list of the nations who were represented by female leaders.

At that time, there were eleven female leaders in Europe, five female leaders in Asia, two female leaders in Africa, three female leaders in the Americas and one female leader in Oceania. Twenty-two female leaders in total representing their nations. Not many on the global scale!

That will not be a great surprise to many of us though, will it? Women have been absolutely held back from decision making and leadership for many thousands of years now, to the detriment of all that was and still is, righteous and worthy of life.

Looking back at that list and today´s current list, I can see some gains and some losses but even so, there are now twenty-seven female national leaders. So, where have the gains and losses been made in these last two years, politically speaking! End of quote.

This was a fascinating bit of study that I did for this chapter and the following chapter which is a natural continuation of this chapter twenty. I decided to find every female who had at a time, had the power of leadership decision. It makes for very interesting reading when all laid out as such. To really see just how few females have been able to take on a position of leadership on all five continents. I quote myself again.

Yes, the females have to make themselves available as candidates in the first place but then we have to be prepared to put our trust in them! There is the crux of the matter! Males have ever been our leaders and of course, we are always hoping that this new one will turn out to be somewhat better than the last one. Which is what never happens! Why would it when they are all one and the same? They all went to the same man-made school of politics, did they not?

Females on the other hand, are a totally unknown quantity, politically speaking here, therefore, we have few references for comparison as citizens. We really do not know what women are capable of in the political sphere, do we? But sadly what we still do not know, is what we could as females achieve, if we were many in leadership at the same time! End of quote.

It was not until 1960 that the world elected its very first female leader. It was Sirimavo Bandaranaike who became that first woman to lead her nation of Sri Lanka and I quote myself once more:

But which countries were the first to accept females as leaders and actually vote for them against male rivals? Which countries have been ready to accept females in politics sooner? Maybe surprisingly, given the lowly status afforded to women on the Asian continent, it was in Asia that the first female leader took up office.

On the island of Sri Lanka, another of the wonderful places on Earth that I have had the pleasure to visit, as talked of in my first book ON THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN. Their first female leader, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, actually did three stints of leadership between 1960 to 1965, again in 1970 up to 1977 (some year that was, a real turning point in time and in my life too). Seventeen years on and she was asked again to lead, so, from 1994 until 2000, she continued to try and work her nation.

If you are interested these are the Amazon links to my first book: ON THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN Paperback and ON THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN e-book

MY PAST IS MY PRESENT! A SOUVENIR FROM SRI LANKA!

Neighbours India were next and this lady became very familiar to me in my childhood years. I speak of Mrs. Indira Gandhi, who was voted into leadership in 1966 (the year after I was born) and also led until 1977 in her first stint. She was recalled just three years later to spend another four years as the leader of India; her time being curtailed by her assassination!!

Israel was the other nation to have a female leader in the 1960s and that was Golda Meir, who led between 1969 and 1974. To date she has been Israel´s only female leader. End of quote.

By the end of the chapter, I have made my way up to 2018 of my female leadership tracking and put that on pause temporarily in chapter twenty-one It Is A Man´s World and get back to the board of play and see how the Russian Master´s team are doing against the International Allied team!!

I have a nostalgically, historically, romantic ramble around my home city before getting back to the female leaders and bringing us up to today with who is who. So, come back again for another read and I shall keep plugging on with the book preparation. Have yourselves a great afternoon full of learning.

The book is now on sale (18/08/2023), here are the links to the paperback version: ON THE INSIDE LOOKING OUT  and the e-book version: ON THE INSIDE LOOKING OUT

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