Barack Obama Says Women Would Run The World Better And Research Shows He Isn’t Wrong

Forever President Barack Obama believes women are the answer to several of the world’s problems that men have caused.

“If you look at the world and look at the problems, it’s usually old people, usually old men, not getting out of the way,” Obama said on Monday during a private speech in Singapore about leadership. “They cling to power, they are insecure, they have outdated ideas and the energy and fresh vision and new approaches are squashed,” Obama said. He added that women “are not perfect” but are “indisputably better” than men. “I’m absolutely confident that, for two years, if every nation on earth was run by women, you would see significant improvement across the board on just about everything — living standards and outcomes,” Obama reportedly said.

While we’d be more than happy to take Obama’s word for it, there’s actual research to back up his claim. Studies have found that among racially diverse characteristics generally negatively correlated with economic growth due to bias, discrimination, and conflict), “female leaders were significantly more likely than male leaders to have fast-growing economies,” Susan E. Perkins of the University of Illinois at Chicago Liautaud Graduate School of Business and Katherine W. Phillips of Columbia Business School wrote in February in Harvard Business Review. Among the most diverse countries, those led by women had an average of 5.4% gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the subsequent year, as compared to those led by men, which had an average of 1.1% GDP growth, according to Perkins and Phillips.

“The important takeaway here,” wrote Perkins and Phillips, “is that female leaders are associated with economic outcomes that suggest that they may be better able to unlock the benefits of diversity at the country level than their male counterparts.”