May, who will be responsible for negotiating Britain’s hugely sensitive divorce from the European Union, will have several female peers at the top of global politics once she takes office.
– Heads of government –
– GERMANY: Angela Merkel became Germany’s first woman chancellor when she was elected in 2005 and has led Europe’s biggest economy ever since, gaining a third four-year term in December 2013.
– BANGLADESH: Sheikh Hasina became prime minister in January 2009. She previously held the post between 1996 and 2001.
– NORWAY: Erna Solberg was elected at legislative elections in September 2013, becoming the country’s second female prime minister.
– NAMIBIA: Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila was named prime minister in March 2015 by president Hage Geingob, becoming the country’s first woman head of government.
– POLAND: Beata Szydlo of the conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS) was named prime minister in November, 2015, succeeding another woman, Ewa Kopacz.
– MYANMAR: The Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi became state counsellor, the de facto prime minister, after November 2015 elections.
– Elected heads of state –
– LIBERIA: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became the first African woman president after her election in November 2005 and won a second term in 2012.
– CHILE: Michelle Bachelet, elected in January 2006, handed over power to a man, Sebastian Pinera at the end of her mandate in 2010, then won a second term in December 2013.
– LITHUANIA: Former European Commissioner Dalia Grybauskaite was elected president in May, 2009.
– SOUTH KOREA: Park Geun-Hye was elected in December 2012 becoming the first woman to lead Asia’s fourth biggest economy.
– MALTA: Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca became president in April, 2014, on the proposal of the prime minister, becoming the Mediterranean island’s second woman president.
– CROATIA: Former foreign minister Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic took Croatia’s top job in 2015, becoming the first woman to be elected president by universal suffrage in the Balkans.
– MAURITIUS: Ameenah Gurib-Fakim was elected to the presidency by parliament in June 2015, the first woman to hold the largely ceremonial role.
– NEPAL: Communist Bidhya Devi Bhandari, was elected president by parliament in 2015, becoming the first woman to take over the largely symbolic role.
– MARSHALL ISLANDS: Hilda Heine took over in January, 2016 as the Western Pacific republic’s leader.
– TAIWAN: Academic Tsai Ing-wen, became the Taiwan’s first woman president in January 2016 after elections.
