I’m English, and we have had quite some experience of being ruled by women (Elizabeth 1st, Victoria, Margret Thatcher (plus Elizabeth 2nd) ) and let me tell you it don’t make much difference. In fact whenever a woman becomes leader it often seems she tries to out-macho the contemporary male leaders of the time.
Didn’t you also welcome our new cretatious or crustateon or crouton overlords last week? 
In this country (USA) women control 50% of the vote but 100% of the vagina.
And it’s not like there would be an end to war if women ruled things.
French Ambasador: “Zees is France!! Why are we being bombed!!??”
Female President: “I think you KNOW why…”
I kind of think that any research on the subject would have to include an anthropological study of how we came to the situation in which most nation-leaders are men. Probably has something to do with the hard wiring of brains that occurred early in the evolution of homo sapiens.
The idea that men and women together can do a better job than just men is, IMO, worth pursuing. Is it possible that male nation leaders who had strong wives were better than men who weren’t influenced by their wives? And while we’re asking that, how much influence did the wives (for lack of a more anthropologically correct term) of stone-age tribal leaders exert on tribal government? Is it possible that the modern tradition of relegating the leader’s spouse to the background an artificial construct that really doesn’t serve us well?
I, for one, welcome our new overladies?
Seriously, if anybody can point out any quantifiable differences between the way a woman’s ruled and a man’s ruled before, we might be able to get onto something…
My wife says I’m not supposed to respond to threads like this one.
My favorite part of that book was the imagined dialogue between a couple planning to go to a party:
She: What time do we have to be there?
He: If we leave here at 6:00, we’ll get there on time.
I understood exactly! 
As to the OP, it really depends. If we just drew lots from the general population to determine leaders, one might argue about female tendancies and male tendancies. But we don’t just draw lots (at least in most cases), and there is a rigorous vetting process that we use for our leaders. (No Bush jokes!! )
Observations of chimps have shown that male chimps are much more likely to make up after a fight than female chimps are-- IOW, females bear grudges more often than males do. This seems to be true of human societies, too, although I don’t know of any research that backs it up. Of course, male chimps tend to be the ones that go off and kill neighboring males (I don’t think females have been documented do this to females), so what does that tell us?
And bonobos, well their society is run by females and all they do is have sex all day. Sounds good to me!
Seriously, though if we look at chimp and bonobo society, we have an interesting experiment in male run vs famale run societies of our closest relatives. Bonobo troops are much more peaceful than chimp troops, and they even have more peaceful relations with their neighbors. But then, there are a lot more chimps than bonobos, so maybe the male run societies are more successful. And, I think that if the river that seperates these two species were to disappear, that the chimps would overrun or absorb the bonobos pretty quickly.
“Women ought to run things, as we are friendlier than men, but alas, that is only because we are not allowed to run things.”
Joanna Russ
Which just goes to show that if women ruled the world and were all flaming nymphos, we wouldn’t have any more wars. 
Hatshepsut, the female “king”* of Eqypt, was a more peaceful ruler than her predecessor or successor. To cite just one example.
*There had never been a reigning queen in Egypt before; so she called herself “king” and wore a male pharaoh’s clothing. Legal fiction, you know.
Is that even proven?
I ran a thread on that question a while back but no consensus emerged. http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=297971
coffeecat gets major points for the Joanna Russ quote.
As for women being better leaders than the virile sex, or less cruel: Ever hear of Winnie Mandela, or Madame Mao? Arguably worse than their husbands.
Not to mention all the women who enable patriarchy, genital mutilation, etc., in the name of tradition. It seems like they’re following a dominant female instinct (or what their society has bred & groomed as dominant feminine instinct). If you give supreme authority to the old woman that’s followed & helped prop up belligerent patriarchy, she’ll continue to do the same.
Female empowerment, like any human social reform, needs to be approached carefully, through education, & with its role models & trailblazers the exceptional individuals who get it right, not a vast many who will tend to get it wrong without guidance. And it ideally will proceed in concert with other ethical & moral education.
It’s tempting to think that we can suddenly institute sexual equality or democracy in a country & it will work. Often we fail to realize that these things are sustainable & salutary with social underpinnings that may have to precede the full change by a generation or more. But that’s another thread, innit?
Well, yes. Though isolating exactly what their effects are among various individuals has, to my knowledge, never been finalized.
For example, estrogen and testosterone are hardly inert, but their effects can and do vary from person to person and from time to time.
Margaret Thatcher is the prime example of a woman using masculine traits to succeed in, to borrow a phrase from James Brown, “a man’s world.” When the system is set up in favor of traits that are (traditionally considered) masculine, does it matter if a person conforming to that system has a male or female body? It’s the system that brings out such traits in people, or perhaps I should say it’s the system that encourages individuals with such masculine traits to enter the system and succeed.
The political system of any country in the world that I can think of, without exception, derives historically from patriarchal rule, from a world in which war, aggression, and conquest made political leaders. Not electoral politics. This legacy is seen clearest in autocratic monarchies and miilitary dictatorships. The United States Constitution went a long way toward ameliorating the effects of patriarchy by establishing the rule of the people under law instead of the rule of patriarchs who conquer. But it still preserved the role of a head honcho. Some early Americans seem to have been a little unclear on the concept: they nominated George Washington as King of the United States. This sounds like a joke, but they were serious.
I don’t think a woman succeeding in such a system is likely to transform its basic traits, but more likely adapt her traits to the system, as is true of any man who does the same job.
If the system were set up differently, say if it rewarded traits that are (traditionally considered) feminine, then people with feminine traits would be drawn to participate in it, and we would be debating whether Joe Schmo, the first man to become Prime Auntie of Britain, was the most feminine Prime Auntie in history because he needed feminine traits to succeed in a woman’s world.
My role model as a woman is Eleanor Roosevelt. She was the most influential woman in US history. The inspiration I find in her example, in so many ways, has been of tremendous help in living my life. She was the one who pushed FDR in a liberal direction, especially on civil rights for African-Americans. We owe the liberal heritage of the Democratic Party mostly to Eleanor. She is my favorite example of how a woman’s touch can benefit a nation, but she was not elected. By not contesting elections, she did not need to masculinize her behavior and attitude. If she had been elected president in her own right, would that have made her different? Imponderable. Since Eleanor hated political life (mingling, shmoozing, and pressing the flesh with all kinds of jerks), someone with her personality would never have gotten anywhere in electoral politics. When FDR was governor of New York, she stayed away from Albany as much as possible, and lived in her country retreat where she entertained her girlfriends. So if I imagine Eleanor instead of Franklin winning the White House in 1932, it would not be the same Eleanor we know and love.
Gender essentialism is a seductive philosophy. I once felt seduced by it myself, but its flaws are fairly easily visible, and it’s hard to find anyone any more who articulates that women are inherently better than men, because of their XX chromosomes or something. Let it be noted well, however: The gender-essentialist philosophy that valued men as inherently superior and devalued women as inherently inferior held sway in patriarchal societies for how many thousands of years? And if a few feminists in the 1970s and '80s held up the mirror to men and said “How do you like it when the shoe’s on the other gender?” I frankly don’t blame them a bit.
I believe in a feminine transformation of politics if the system had been formed from the beginning to reward (traditionally considered) feminine values instead of conquest and war. But in such a system, men could share, it wouldn’t be an all-girls club (the way politics was an almost exclusively all-boys club for how many thousands of years?). The men who would succeed in such a system already walk among us; they always have, but I doubt their contributions have been valued very much.
What it comes down to: It doesn’t matter what gender an individual is in politics, what matters is the qualities they bring. Qualities of sharing and caring have been traditionally assigned to womanhood, while aggression and toughness have been traditionally assigned to manhood. In the aggregate, I still see more women exhibiting the softer qualities, and more men with the harder qualities, but that determines nothing about the character of an individual. Therefore if a system were set up to reward the softer qualities, I think women on the whole would do better. Under the traditionally patriarchal system, it was easier on the whole for men to do better.
Perhaps the major gender breakthrough of contemporary humanity is to realize that those genderized traits are not deterministic.
People who seek leadership positions are likely to share more traits with other “natural leaders” than they share with other members of their gender. In other words, if there were a worldwide gender shift in power, not much would change other than how they pee.
I typed something inaccurate above, then checked on it later. Actually, Eleanor Roosevelt was a spirited political campaigner. It was just Albany she didn’t like. Maybe she could have been elected president. It’s just that between 1884 and 1964, no woman ran for president.
I don’t think that site you cite lists all the women who ran. You’re interpreting from silence. Didn’t the Populist Party run Presidential candidates sometimes? They had some high-profile women who might have run.
Then please enlighten me! I’m all ears!
Here’s a list of third-party presidential candidates: http://www.presidentsusa.net/thirdparty.html I don’t see any women between Victoria Woodhull (Equal Rights Party, 1872) and Lenora Fulani (New Alliance, 1988). Some surprises there, though. I didn’t know Douglas MacArthur ran for president (Constitution/America First) in 1952.
However, the list linked above bears a disclaimer: “This list does not purport to be a complete list of all third party general election candidates throughout history. It does attempt to list those that received at least approximately 1% of the vote, those candidates who are/were prominent for other reasons, or those candidates who have run multiple times.”
Hm. First Ladies throughout history.
Martha Washington. She traveled with George in the field, and was significant in maintaining battlefield morale.
Abigail Adams. Really, nothing need be said. She was a partner, and a thinker, and really, if you wanted a counterpart to the Bill/Hillary relationship, it would be her and John.
Martha Jefferson: Jefferson was a widower in office. Not much information.
Dolley Madison: Credited with creating the role of the ‘First Lady’, essentially. No slouch otherwise, she had the presence of mind to save a number of important papers and the famed Stuart painting of George Washington when Washington DC was burned. She was the social face of the Madison White House, and again, viewed as an important partner.
Elizabeth Monroe: Sickly during term in office. Husband seemed devoted.
Louisa Adams: Interesting figure. Again, ran social affairs, had no fear of risky travel, a solid partner to her husband, ran weekly ‘drawing room parties’, despite her preference for privacy.
I don’t know. A good amount of them seemed to be involved in presidential activities. Drawing-room politics was no metaphor until sometime after WII. Things were different, then.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Lady_of_the_United_States
It honestly seems to me that the passive view of the First Lady is a reaction to Eleanor Roosevelt, who was more active than God. I don’t think that it was a natural state.
A random sampling: Helen Taft, politically active. Lou Hoover, not so much. Grace Coolidge, highly active. Florence Harding, active. Edith Wilson: Essentially president for a period. Helen Taft, active.