Eight Women Who Led Governments, from Sirimavo Bandaranaike to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

After her husband S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike was assassinated in 1959, she led his party to victory in 1960 and became the first woman to serve as a national prime minister. She held three terms, 1960 to 1965, 1970 to 1977 and 1994 to 2000.

Daughter of India's first prime minister, she governed from 1966 to 1977 and again from 1980 until her assassination in 1984. In 1975 she declared a state of emergency that lasted twenty one months, the sharpest authoritarian turn in independent India's history.

Born in Kiev and raised in Milwaukee, she became Israel's fourth prime minister in 1969, the first woman to hold the office. She resigned in 1974 after criticism of preparedness for the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Prime minister from 1979 to 1990, the first woman to hold the office in Europe. Her program of privatisation and trade union reform came to be called Thatcherism, and she resigned in 1990 after a challenge from within her own party.

She entered politics after her husband Benigno Aquino Jr. was assassinated in 1983, and became the Philippines first woman president in 1986 after the People Power Revolution ended Ferdinand Marcos's rule. She served until 1992 and survived several attempted military coups.

In 1988 she became the first woman to lead the government of a Muslim majority country, four years after her father was executed by a military government. She served two terms, 1988 to 1990 and 1993 to 1996, and was assassinated in Rawalpindi in December 2007.

Raised in East Germany and trained as a physicist, she entered politics after reunification and served as chancellor from 2005 to 2021, the first woman in the office. Her decision in 2015 to keep German borders open to over a million asylum seekers was praised by supporters and blamed by critics for strengthening the far right.

President of Liberia from 2006 to 2018, the first woman elected head of state of an African country. She worked to rebuild the country after its civil war, established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission and shared the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.