Gro Harlem Brundtland: This is the way it will be if women rule the world

Former Prime Minister of Norway Gro Harlem Brundtland.Photo: Terje Pedersen / NTB scanpix

You’ll be wrong if you think that women cannot be tough leaders,  Gro Harlem Brundtland admonishes. She now hopes Hillary Clinton will break the “glass ceiling”.
– I hope it happens, Brundtland says to the news agency NTB.

Hillary Clinton is today by far the in the best position to win the presidential election in the United States. That means we can get a situation where  the three major powers of the West are all headed by women – the US, Germany and Britain.

Brundtland says she has been waiting for this since she was young.

– If we now eill get Hillary Clinton as the US president, it’s something that comes relatively late, but it’s still not bad, she says.

Doing what the role requires

NTB is meeting Brundtland in Paris, where she has been appointed a honorary doctorate at the Sorbonne. In a conversation with students at the university, she was asked what distinguishes men and women as leaders.

– Some believe that if only women led the world, there’d be peace, no woman would have gone to war. Then I usually remind them of Margaret Thatcher.

When she was prime minister of Britain, she went to war over the Falklands,  Brundtland said.

She thinks it’s about doing what the role requires.

– This is something we women do when we become leaders. That is something we all have seen,  Brundtland says to NTB.

– Those who have the attitude that all problems will be solved if it is only women who govern, have overlooked the fact that there a good deal of difficult problems .

There are reasons why serious tensions arise between the countries. If you believe that any woman today will be a pacifist, then you are guilty of misinterpreting what the role of leadership is, she says.

 

Source: NTB scanpix / Norway Today