Speaking of putting women to work, Barack Obama says we’d all be better off putting women in charge of government… every government:
The former US president made the remarks during a wide-ranging conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin at Salem State University in Massachusetts on Monday, 21 September.
…’Even when I was president, I sometimes fantasised about, if you put women in charge of every government for like two years and then just kind of saw, all right, how are things going?’ Obama said.
‘I have a strong belief that things would — they wouldn’t be perfect,’ he added. ‘But they’d be better!’ Goodwin interjected. ‘But they’d be better. I’m confident about that. I really do,’ Obama replied [Terence Repelente, “Obama Says Governments Would Be ‘Better’ If Women Ran Them: ‘I’m Confident About That’,” International Business Times, 2026.09.25].
Obama expressed the same confidence in female leadership in Singapore in 2019:
“Now women, I just want you to know; you are not perfect, but what I can say pretty indisputably is that you’re better than us [men].
“I’m absolutely confident that for two years if every nation on earth was run by women, you would see a significant improvement across the board on just about everything… living standards and outcomes” [Saira Asher, “Barack Obama: Women Are Better Leaders Than Men,” BBC, 2019.12.16].
Donald Trump this morning said that the idea that women are good leaders “ridiculous“:
Q: Barack Obama just said ‘if you put women in charge of every government for two years, things would be better.’ Do you buy that?
TRUMP: It’s ridiculous. I love women. I think they’re great. But what a ridiculous statement that is.
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) September 26, 2026 at 10:15 AM
Perhaps the difference in how Obama and Trump view women’s leadership abilities has some relation to the quality of the women with whom each man has chosen to most closely associate.
I believe having more balance would be more likely to improve things. Not sure about women running everything, just like men running everything hasn’t worked well. Would it be better overall if they did? Perhaps, but I’d prefer balance.