President Bachelet of Chile Is the Last Woman Standing in the Americas<br />The three powerful female presidents in South America — Ms. Bachelet, Dilma Rousseff in Brazil<br />and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina — came to office with the endorsement of popular male incumbents at a time when leftist parties promising to create more equitable societies appealed to voters.<br />Lakshmi Puri said that It’s three steps forward and six steps back,<br />It was a sobering feeling, she said, that she had become "a repository of the dreams<br />and aspirations of so many people who had great expectations for my government." During her first four-year term, Ms. Bachelet steered legislative efforts to curb workplace discrimination, to protect victims of domestic violence and to expand health care for women, arguing that it was much more than a matter of fairness.<br />During her second term, she created a ministry of women and gender equality, and passed an electoral change requiring<br />that at least 40 percent of candidates for elected office be women.<br />After Ms. Bachelet’s term ends next year, none of the countries in North or South America are expected to have female presidents,<br />a notable turnaround in a part of the world where, until recently, women have been elected to lead influential democracies.<br />And when female politicians complain about double standards in politics, they are often accused of playing the "gender card," argued<br />Farida Jalalzai, a professor at Oklahoma State University who published a book last year about Latin America’s female presidents.
