Is America ready to elect a Black woman president?

It’s the big question that has loomed over Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign from the start: is the United States ready for a Black woman president? I get asked this almost every time I speak about American politics. And it’s a question that pundits, observers and experts keep asking, without ever landing on an answer.

That’s because the question is, in the end, unanswerable. It’s so heavily loaded that answering it requires too much history, cultural knowledge, judgment and speculation. While the question hints at the deeply ingrained racism and sexism that is built into the structures of American politics and culture, it doesn’t directly address these things, leaving assumptions about just how sexist and racist the country might be unresolved.

Asking if America is “ready” also assumes that history is progress – that things move forward in a relatively straight line. It assumes that in the past America was not ready for a Black woman president, but at some point in the future it might be. It assumes, as Martin Luther King junior once said so beautifully, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”.

Like much of King’s teachings, this idea has been flattened into an assumption that “progress” is inevitable – that women and people of colour will eventually get equal representation and treatment as society learns, gradually, to become more just, tolerant and accepting. It assumes that, one day, the United States will live up to its own foundational ideal that “all men are created equal”.

But as Harris has herself said, the United States has not always lived up to its own ideals. Progress on equality – especially in extending it beyond the original, exclusively white men identified in the Constitution – has been patchy and frustratingly slow. It has also been marred by violence and even war.

History is not a forward march. It does not “progress” to some end point of idealism. It is, more often than not, a fight. Many other countries have shown it is possible to be “ready” for a woman leader at various points in their histories, only to return to being not ready again.

India, the largest democracy in the world, elected Indira Gandhi to the prime ministership in 1966. Gandhi served for over a decade, and then again from 1980 to 1984, when she was assassinated. Every leader since then has been a man. Similarly, the United Kingdom elected its first woman prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, in 1979. After Thatcher resigned in 1990, the UK didn’t have another woman leader until Theresa May from 2016–19 and then Liz Truss in 2022 (and that didn’t exactly go well).

In Australia, Julia Gillard won a very close election to become prime minister in 2010, only to lose to a man four years later. There has been no real suggestion that a woman, let alone a woman of colour, might ascend to the leadership of either major party in the decade since. And could Australia even be definitively considered “ready” for a woman leader in that period, given how Gillard was treated during her prime ministership?

New Zealand has a stronger record. Jenny Shipley became the first woman prime minister in 1997 by bumping off the leader of the coalition government. Helen Clark was then the first woman to be elected prime minister in 1999, followed by Jacinda Ardern nearly two decades later, in 2017.

While Britain, New Zealand and Australia have some political and cultural similarities with the United States, they have different political structures. Unlike in the US, their leaders are not directly elected, making the specific identity of the leader less explicitly the focus of elections.

Other countries with direct elections, though, have also been “ready” for women leaders at one point or another. In 1980, Iceland became the first country in the world to directly elect a woman to the presidency. Vigdís Finnbogadóttir served for 16 years. Deeply conservative Ireland was also ready 30 years ago, directly electing its first woman president, Mary Robinson, in 1990.

For the most part, though, these women are exceptions to ingrained, structural gender inequality in politics across the world – albeit a reality reflected more starkly in the American experience.

The fact the question of “readiness” remains so prominent reflects the fundamental reality of the unequal representation of women, especially Black women and women of colour, not just in America but in most democracies.

In June this year, UN Women noted only 27 countries currently have women leaders. It said: At the current rate, gender equality in the highest positions of power will not be reached for another 130 years.

The idea of a “rate” of progress once again assumes the world will be ready for women leaders one day (even if that day might be more than a century away).

Unsurprisingly, the same structural inequality is reflected below the highest levels of leadership. UN Women found only 15 countries where women hold at least 50% of Cabinet minister positions. And when women do get leadership positions, it’s often in areas traditionally understood as “women’s” or “minority” issues, such as social services or Indigenous affairs.

This general trend is reflected in the US, too. After the most recent US election, the Congress has a “record number” of women. Yet it is still just 28%.

Similarly, in Australia, research by The Australia Institute found women are underrepresented in seven of Australia’s nine parliaments.

That should not, however, undermine the significant achievements of women and people of colour, who have long fought for a seat at the table of power – often at great personal risk.

According to the Pew Research Center, the current Congress in the US is also the most racially and ethnically diverse in history, with 133 representatives and senators identifying their ethnicity as something other than non-Hispanic white.

And in 2021, Harris became the first woman, the first person of South Asian descent and the first Black woman to be vice president of the United States. In another historic milestone, President Joe Biden appointed the first Native American woman to a Cabinet position – Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.

A milestone was achieved in Australia, too, when Linda Burney became the first Aboriginal woman to serve as minister for Indigenous affairs in 2022.