Where is our next woman PM?

After a referendum in Britain where it chose to exit the EU, Theresa May swiftly became prime minister, replacing David Cameron.

Britain has a woman prime minister and, simultaneously, a Muslim of Pakistani heritage as mayor of London. A win that clearly emerges from its centuries-old democratic tradition and not from what our people rely on: influence. This is perhaps why our marginalised communities remain on the fringes.

Theresa May may be a proponent of tough terror laws and stringent immigration policies, but her politics is not the point entirely. The point is that children in the UK, both boys and girls, will grow up knowing that having a woman prime minister is not just possible, but done, once again. A woman at the head of affairs, running the country from its economy and investments to what policies govern its working class, talks volumes about how it’s not a question of ‘if’ but a question of ‘why not?’.

Malala Yousufzai said, “We will not accept a world where decisions about our future are made in rooms girls cannot enter.”

Sadly, on our side of the world, women are kept behind closed doors where none of the decisions take place about anything substantive, except maybe the type of bread to have that day. We have such stubborn conservatism in this country that I bet it will survive a nuclear holocaust and be left behind with the cockroaches.

Whereas Theresa May has identified that the wage gap between men and women in the UK must go, our challenge in Pakistan is that we want women to be seen. In some of our cities, particularly in K-P and Fata, women aren’t allowed to take their kids to school, get milk or — God forbid — scout for economic opportunities.

The world is changing. We find that it is no longer defined by the values and preferences of noughties. LEDs are going out of market, taxis are being replaced by Ubers and women are becoming more competent than men in many fields. Thankfully, the world is more fluid.

The inclusion of women in leadership positions means more productivity, more representation and more transparency, at the least. It also means respite from the ultra-combative nature of men’s politics. It means a move towards inclusion and hopefully, sustainability.

Men are able to prop other men into positions of power as a result of women’s silence. This creates a vacuum that always ends up getting filled.

The Suffragettes, however, warned us that women’s deeds and not words determine their feminism. Many in the UK find May’s policies lacking, particularly for women, even though she is propped up as a “woman’s woman.”

From our more external perspective, May’s prime ministership is both a joy for women and somewhat of a taser gun. It’s time we move 50 per cent of the boys out, decade by decade. It’s time Pakistani women were given the turn they deserved for the top positions.

On a recent Facebook post of a large Pakistani conference with an all-male panel, I congratulated the organisers for excluding the entire cadre of women leaders in the country. They protested by saying they don’t care about optics and being fashionable. I cringed, because reducing equal representation to a game of optics is both unfair and unmindful of men’s privilege.

Theresa May, whatever her politics may be, is a huge boost to the global women’s movement. Even if her politics is not that great, let it be, after all, why should men have the monopoly on making bad choices and women held up to standards of perfection? It’s about time that we realised that we were not ok with women not getting it all right all the time, or even most of the time.

When the first woman prime minister in the Muslim world, Benazir Bhutto, said “Democracy needs support, and the best support for democracy comes from other democracies”, perhaps she also meant that Pakistan could use 10 Downing Street to lend it some inspiration. This is applicable to the present, in getting Pakistani women to at least start thinking about being prime minister.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 15^th, 2016.

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