Women are the best leaders

So now the internet is buzzing with the news: women make the best leaders! The few countries which are led by women are really great at COVID-19 response! It is official! There can be no other explanation, right?

Except…
By this measure, this
guy

is an even greater leader… after all, Eastern and Central European countries responded very resolutely to the pandemic, and these steps largely worked.

So now, when we say that a few countries prove that women leaders are the best, do we also say that Orban is a woman? Or do we say suppressing democracy also works? How about countries, which are led by women and responded poorly to COVID-19?

It is quite astonishing, really, that an idea takes root somewhere, some news outlets pick it up, then it becomes real, since so many news outlets are reporting about it, it must be true. The idea becomes reality.

Apart from the stupidity of identity politics, which looks at everything through gender or race (I wonder why during the 2015 refugee crisis they did not say women leaders were crap, based on how Merkel handled the situation, or when Germany essentially took down the economies of Greece and Spain, that women leaders are horribly aggressive. It is also a stroke of luck for these people that May is not in power in the UK, because, well… the UK response has been less than stellar, and May was not exactly the efficient leader women are supposed to be.

And there are other factors to consider, too, unsurprisingly. First of all, you really want to make sweeping generalizations based on a few statistical outliers? How many countries are there, and how many heads of state are women? Even if you are willing to do that (opening up the way to other, more dangerous generalizations based on outliers -how many deaths did muslim terrorists cause in the last decade, for example?), are you sure you are not ignoring everything else that may cause the difference?
Perhaps it is not the female leaders per se we should be discussing; after all they are not absolute monarchs who make decisions on their own. (I think. At least I thought in a democracy they don't.) Perhaps countries where women can and do get into power tend to be technologically, socially on the more advanced side (I am starting to hate the word "progressive"), with relatively low population density - in short, in countries where we could expect an efficient response to the pandemic, we have a higher chance to see women leaders. (Except if the country is in Central or Eastern Europe, because then it seems like efficient response can be expected from male members of society as well.)

And then there are the inconvenient facts nobody mentions about Germany… But that's another issue altogether.