Did female leaders trump men in dealing with the pandemic?

It isn’t hard to imagine what would happen if an academic produced a paper claiming that countries led by men were more entrepreneurial or are better at negotiating international deals. The sky would fall in on them before the ink was dry. Their paper wouldn’t find a mainstream journal to publish it, anyway, but the mere existence of the study would be enough to have them denounced by students and thrown out of their university.

But if you were to publish a study claiming that countries led by women have coped better with the Covid-19 pandemic, with fewer cases and fewer deaths than countries led my men? We know what would happen in this instance because two economists have just done it: Supriya Garikipati of Liverpool University and Uma Kambhampati of Reading University. Their study, published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research and the World Economic Forum, tries to analyse the records of male-led countries against female-led ones and concludes that the latter came off better than the former.