I have come to believe, at a fairly deep and intuitive level, that the United States needs a woman to lead it.
I don’t mean that women are inherently wiser, kinder, or morally superior to men. I have met humans. The data set does not support that conclusion. Nor do I mean that simply putting a woman in the presidency would somehow heal the country. Women are perfectly capable of being authoritarian, aggressive, petty, narcissistic, competitive, and all the other qualities men have worked so hard to monopolize.
What I mean is something different. I think America may have confused one particular kind of strength with leadership itself, and I wonder if that mistake goes back much further than American politics. The question that started rattling around in my head was this: Why have we constructed leadership so that its most recognizable behaviors resemble masculinity under competition?
Think about the language we use. A leader must be strong. They must never back down. They need to fight, stand their ground, destroy their opponent in a debate, defend their people, command the room, project strength, and refuse to show weakness. We speak about political leadership as if somewhere behind the podium there is still a mammoth that needs killing. And perhaps, psychologically speaking, there is.
There is an appealing evolutionary story in which the biggest, strongest man in an ancestral tribe simply beat everybody else until they agreed he was in charge. There is some truth buried in that image, but anthropology makes the story considerably stranger. Humans appear to have developed at least two broad pathways to social status: dominance and prestige.
Dominance says, You should defer to me because I can impose costs on you. Prestige says, You should defer to me because I know something, can do something, or possess qualities that are valuable to the group. One produces compliance through the threat of consequences. The other produces voluntary deference through competence, admiration, or usefulness. Both can generate influence, and both appear to be deeply rooted in human social life.
What surprised me is that many hunter-gatherer societies were not simply primitive monarchies with the toughest guy sitting on a rock telling everyone what to do. Quite the opposite. Anthropologists have documented egalitarian groups that could be remarkably hostile toward would-be tyrants. People who became too bossy, selfish, aggressive, or commanding might be mocked, ignored, ostracized, or otherwise brought back down to size. Leadership often depended less on coercion than on persuasion, knowledge, generosity, competence, judgment, and the continued willingness of other people to listen.
Apparently even our ancestors had to deal with the guy who thought every group project needed a CEO, and they had methods.
This matters because domination was never the only form of human leadership. We have ancient psychological machinery for responding to physical strength and coercive power, certainly, but also for following wisdom, competence, generosity, and people who are useful to the collective.
Somewhere along the way, however, dominance became easier to preserve. As human groups became larger and more settled, resources could be accumulated and controlled. Agriculture, food storage, growing population density, warfare, property, and increasingly complex institutions created new opportunities to concentrate power. A leader who controlled land, food, soldiers, or law possessed something a respected hunter or persuasive elder did not: the ability to make dissent more expensive and departure more difficult.
Hierarchy became more durable, and power could become institutional rather than merely personal. Leadership could increasingly move from people listen to me toward people have to listen to me. The chief becomes the king, the king commands the army, and the army protects the state. Political and military authority become increasingly intertwined. Because warfare has historically been overwhelmingly male, our image of the powerful leader becomes increasingly masculine as well—not simply male, but masculinity under conditions of conflict.
Strength, certainty, aggression, territorial defense, loyalty to the group, willingness to impose costs on an enemy, and the ability to withstand attack without appearing afraid all make perfect sense when another tribe is coming over the hill. The problem is that eventually the tribe becomes a nation of hundreds of millions of people, and we keep looking for the person who looks best standing on the hill.
This is part of what makes sports so interesting to me. For many boys, sports are one of the first places where leadership is taught explicitly. And to be clear, sports teach some wonderful things: discipline, sacrifice, persistence, courage, trust, teamwork, and the ability to subordinate individual desire to something larger than yourself. These are real virtues.
But notice the architecture in which many boys learn them: we cooperate so that we can defeat someone else. There is our team and their team. There is offense and defense. There is territory. There is a goal, and another group is actively preventing us from reaching it. There is a scoreboard, and at the end ambiguity disappears. Someone won and someone lost.
That is an extraordinarily useful social structure for certain kinds of problems, but it is also almost perfectly designed to teach intergroup competition. Research on leadership preferences becomes fascinating here. In experimental settings, people have shown greater preference for male leadership when their group is competing against another group, while female leadership can become more attractive when the problem is managing relationships and competition within the group. Other work has shown that men can become more cooperative with members of their own group when facing an outside rival.
In other words, there may be something quite old inside us that says, There is an enemy. Find the warrior. Which would be fine if the central problem of American government were defeating Canada. So far, I think we’re holding our own. But that isn’t the problem.
The United States is one country. This seems embarrassingly obvious, but psychologically I am not sure we behave as if we understand it. Democrats and Republicans are not neighboring tribes competing for the same watering hole. Liberals cannot ultimately defeat conservatives. Conservatives cannot ultimately defeat liberals. Rural Americans are not going to eliminate urban Americans. Religious people are not going to eliminate secular people. Texas is not going to defeat California in the championship game and receive the Constitution as a trophy.
We are stuck with one another. That’s the deal.
Which means the fundamental problem of democratic leadership is not, How do I lead my people to victory over their enemies? It is, How do millions of people with genuinely conflicting values, interests, identities, histories, fears, and desires continue living together without destroying the system that allows them to disagree?
That is an entirely different leadership problem. It requires strength, certainly, but another kind of strength: listening without capitulating, compromise without abandoning principle, reading the emotional temperature of a group, allowing someone to preserve dignity while changing position, understanding that being technically correct does not necessarily make someone feel heard, building coalitions among people who do not particularly like one another, and recognizing that sometimes maintaining the relationship is itself part of the objective. It means holding competing needs without immediately requiring one of them to disappear.
These are abilities our culture has traditionally coded as feminine, and there is the irony.
Women have historically been expected to develop social capacities that men were often permitted to neglect. Women were expected to accommodate, nurture, smooth conflict, maintain relationships, notice emotional undercurrents, remember who is not speaking to whom, and somehow still get everyone through Thanksgiving dinner without the police becoming involved.
Those expectations have frequently been oppressive, and I don’t want to romanticize them. Women learned many of these skills partly because societies denied them other forms of power. When coercion is unavailable, influence becomes more relational. When physical dominance is unavailable, persuasion becomes more important. When you cannot simply command the room, you become very good at reading it.
Culture then performs an interesting trick. It pressures women to develop these capacities and subsequently describes the same capacities as evidence that women are not strong enough to lead.
Leadership research still reflects some of this contradiction. We continue to associate leadership more readily with traditionally masculine qualities such as assertiveness, decisiveness, and agency, while women are more often associated with communal qualities. The result is a familiar double bind: behave communally and risk appearing insufficiently leader-like; behave aggressively and risk being judged for violating expectations about how a woman should behave.
Maybe the problem is not that women lack the qualities we associate with leadership. Maybe we have associated leadership with an incomplete set of qualities. The traits we have historically dismissed as soft may actually be sophisticated technologies for solving the exact problem democracy presents.
A democracy is not merely a machine for implementing the will of whoever wins 51 percent of the vote. It is a system for maintaining cooperation among people who continually lose arguments to one another. That is harder. Winning is easy to understand. Living together afterward is the trick.
Every American president so far has been a man, and the office itself is wrapped in the imagery of masculine command: Commander in Chief, executive authority, the nuclear codes, the Situation Room, military salutes, motorcades, power projected across the world.
Some of that is unavoidable. A president really does need to make decisions involving war, defense, danger, and genuine adversaries. Sometimes you need the war chief.
But the presidency also requires someone to lead Pittsburgh and Portland, oil workers and climate activists, evangelicals and atheists, immigrants and people terrified by immigration, billionaires and people working two jobs who still cannot pay rent, people who own seventeen guns and people who become anxious seeing one, and hundreds of millions of people who cannot even agree on whether putting pineapple on pizza constitutes a violation of natural law.
This is less like commanding an army than doing family systems therapy for an impossibly large group of furious relatives. And yet, election after election, we tend to reward candidates for displaying behaviors suited to the first task. Who looked stronger? Who dominated? Who landed the better attack? Who refused to apologize? Who made the other person look weak? Who won the debate?
Even that last phrase is revealing: won the debate. Our mechanism for discussing ideas becomes a sporting event. There must be a winner, which means there must be a loser.
Eventually that logic spreads from elections into governance itself. My legislation passed, therefore you lost. My judge was confirmed, therefore you lost. My president won, therefore you lost. My America defeated your America. Then we seem surprised that half the population experiences the government as an occupying force whenever the other half wins an election.
Perhaps we are repeatedly selecting leaders optimized for the psychological experience of intergroup conflict when the United States is fundamentally facing a problem of intragroup cohesion. That distinction may be everything.
This brings me back to where I began. I want to see a woman lead the United States, partly because every president in our history has been male and at some point the sample size becomes ridiculous. But more importantly, I want to see what happens when leadership itself is allowed to take another shape.
Not because a woman cannot be aggressive. Not because a man cannot be nurturing. Not because chromosomes contain foreign policy strategies. I want us to expand what strength looks like.
Maybe strength is sometimes refusing to destroy someone when you have the opportunity. Maybe strength is absorbing anger without immediately returning it. Maybe strength is understanding that compromise between citizens is not surrender because your fellow citizen is not your enemy. Maybe strength is creating enough psychological safety that people can change their minds without feeling humiliated. Maybe strength is keeping the group intact.
And maybe some of the traits we have historically coded as feminine are not alternatives to strength at all. Maybe they are forms of strength designed for a different kind of problem.
That leaves me with a question I cannot quite shake: What if the crisis isn’t that America has failed to find the right strongman? What if our definition of strength itself is an evolutionary artifact from the wrong kind of problem?
A warrior needs to defeat the people outside the walls. A democratic leader has a much stranger assignment: the people arguing inside the walls all have to wake up tomorrow and still belong to the same country.
You cannot conquer your way out of that. You cannot humiliate your way out of it. And eventually, if every political victory requires someone else to become your enemy, there will not be much of a country left to win.
A nation is not an opponent to be defeated. It is a relationship that has to survive.