“When I walk out of the office, people are maybe not expecting a woman,” says Megan Barry, when I ask whether she has experienced sexism since being elected mayor of Nashville, Tennessee, just over a year ago. “You can see the surprise in their eyes: ‘Oh, ha! It’s a woman, not a man.’ But I spent over 20 years in corporate America and this isn’t anything new.”  Barry, who is 53, has spent the past year creating 4,700 jobs, launching a $6bn (£4.87bn) urban transit plan, developing legislation to encourage the building of affordable housing and supporting a bill to decriminalise possession of small amounts of cannabis. With a budget of $2.1bn, 50 departments and 10,000 employees she likens her job to that of CEO of a large company, and is already counting down, literally, to her re-election fight in 2019.  “I have a counter app on my phone. For the first 100 days, it counted up, since everybody wants to know what you did in your first 100 days. But now it counts back, so every morning I take a look: how many days do I have until I’m re-elected? I have a finite amount of days to do this and I don’t want to waste a single one of them. Today it’s 1,051 days.”  Just 19% of big-city US mayors are women, so Barry remains a relative rarity. But globally the number of women mayors is rising, and she is part a growing group of politicians who have become the first woman to lead their cities. Paris, Barcelona, Montevideo, Prague, Cologne, Warsaw, Bucharest, Rome and Baghdad are among the urban centres that have recently chosen (or in Baghdad’s case, had appointed) female leaders.  Statistics for the proportion of women mayors internationally don’t exist, and “mayor” can mean different things: some are directly elected, with the strongest mandates and highest profiles; others are the leaders of city councils elected by fellow councillors; some are state appointees. But the first-ever meeting of the Global Parliament of Mayors in the Hague last month showed nine female mayors out of 57 high-profile cities.  And this month, many of those mayors from around the world will come together at Habitat III, the UN’s global summit on sustainable urban development, which takes place every 20 years. The New Urban Agenda produced from the event hopes to steer national and local governments to make improvements to all aspects of urban life, including “to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls, ensuring women’s full and effective participation and equal rights in all fields and in leadership at all levels of decision-making”.  Barcelona’s Ada Colau, mayor since June 2015, has been making headlines for her “radical” leftwing policies, having risen to power from the grassroots group La PAH, which campaigns against Spain’s tenant evictions and mortgage repossessions following the financial crisis. Anne Hidalgo, who became Paris’ first female mayor in April 2014, is taking bold steps to curb car use in the French capital and improve air quality. The two mayors recently collaborated on a manifesto that called on European cities to welcome refugees.  In Liberia, the first African country to elect a female president, mayoral elections are deemed too expensive, explains Cyvette Gibson, who was appointed Paynesville’s first female mayor by president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in 2012. Gibson, who is 41, spent much of 2014 struggling to control Ebola in Paynesville, a city on the eastern fringes of the capital, Monrovia. Since then waste, water and sanitation have been the dominant themes of her mayoralty, along with getting former child soldiers off narcotics and into jobs.  “There was a backlog of waste in this city going back 70 years. People were disposing of waste in their backyards, burying or burning it, and the city was in a deplorable state,” she says. After a clean-up, she introduced new systems as part of a World Bank waste project, and believes appointing women to key roles has been fundamental to her success.  Every woman who becomes a mayor is taking the road not taken and opening that road for other women.  “I always say women build differently than men,” she says. “Men build for today but women build for tomorrow because we’re interested in making sure we have some form of security for our children. That’s why we elected a woman as president in Liberia – we knew we needed a woman to rebuild our nation.”  On the face of it, Nashville’s Megan Barry or the clutch of women politicians now running European capitals might appear to have little in common with Gibson or with Vera Baboun, the 51-year-old Palestinian mayor of Bethlehem.  Baboun, a former literature scholar, has spent her term redrawing municipal boundaries, dealing with the damage caused to Bethlehem’s business district by the wall dividing the West Bank from Israel, and focusing on providing sufficient accommodation for tourists and pilgrims. But Baboun, one of three women who make up the 20% female quota on her council, has built links with female mayors in other cities, and says “every woman who becomes a mayor is taking the road not taken and opening that road for other women”.  “Being a woman at the head of the table wasn’t easy the first time,” she adds. “Some colleagues thought they should be in my place, so the first year was critical. My strategy was always to act. The effort required from women is double that required from men but internationally, being a woman has definitely been an advantage. I have the status to speak as the head of the city, and in Palestine I have become an important figure.”  Few supporters of women’s equality see no benefit at all in the elevation of women to roles previously occupied only by men. But there are plenty who pour cold water on the idea that where one leads, others will follow, or that the election of a first female mayor – or indeed a first woman as a country’s president or prime minister – changes anything much.  Ulrik Kjaer, professor of political science at the University of Southern Denmark, says recent Scandinavian political history justifies such doubts. While Denmark has had its first female prime minister, and the sexes are widely seen to be more equal there than almost anywhere else, the percentage of female mayors in the country has not risen above 15%.  Women still have a very hard time being accepted as political leaders, especially in local politics.  “Since we have already some women mayors and we’ve had a female PM, we tend to tick off gender – ‘OK, we’re done with that, we’ve reached some kind of parity’ – and focus on other under-represented groups, immigrants and young people and so on ... when in fact gender parity has not been reached,” he says. “Women still have a very hard time being accepted as political leaders, especially in local politics.”  Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics, echoes this. She says Hillary Clinton’s run for US president creates the “false impression that women have really made it in politics. If she wins it will be enormously significant but it masks the reality. We’re not anticipating a year of great strides. We might get from 19% women in the House of Representatives to 20%. State legislatures are not particularly great, and at governor level there are only six women [out of 50].”  Walsh believes the women with positions in American politics are, on the whole, more moderate, because women are more economically vulnerable than men, and see themselves as more likely to need state help. But she adds that partisan pulls have recently become stronger.  She points to a lack of research into local government internationally as one problem confronting anyone trying to understand what impact, if any, women legislators make. She also notes that the jobs of mayor or governor pose particular challenges, because the stereotype of the good female politician is of a skilful group or committee worker, not a charismatic boss.  This point is echoed by Dorothy Thornhill, mayor of Watford in England for the past 14 years, and one of just four directly elected English female mayors. “People think leadership equals male characteristics,” she says. “The idea that you have to be this macho-type of person is still around.” As mayor, she has played against this type, and cheerfully reports how on a school visit a child shouted out, “You ain’t no mayor! You ain’t a fat bald geezer with a chain!”  A schoolchild shouted: 'You ain’t no mayor! You ain’t a fat bald geezer with a chain!'  So far Thornhill has turned down invitations to international conferences and gatherings of mayors (“I just know it would be on the front page of the Watford Observer – ‘Mayor on jolly’,” she says). But having once been a sceptic, she now believes directly elected mayors are the future of local government, not just in the UK where a handful of powerful new city-region mayors are due to be elected next year, but internationally.  Last year the thinktank LGIU and Fawcett Society launched a Commission on Women in Local Government. If this aims to fill in gaps in knowledge of what is going on in the UK, evidence on the impact of female mayors globally looks set to remain hard-to-come-by for some time.  “You see a woman’s body and you see a feminist outcome, but a woman’s body might not have a feminist mind,” says Sarah Childs, professor of politics and gender at Bristol University. While the election of a woman mayor can signal a desire for change, or rejection of the status quo – the mayors of Rome and Turin are both from Beppe Grillo’s anti-establishment Five Star Movement, while those in Barcelona and Madrid are leftists – it is hard to draw any firm conclusions about what this might mean for women longer-term.  One influential aspect, however, is that these female leaders are showing a younger generation of girls what is possible. “Not too long ago I was in a parade, and somebody shouted, ‘Here comes the mayor!’” says Megan Barry. “Three little girls on a stoop looked up and one of them said, ‘Which one is he?’ so I got to walk over and say, ‘Actually it’s me,’ and she replied, ‘You mean a girl can be mayor?’”  But while not every woman mayor is a feminist with the specific goal of improving the lives of women in their city, it is still the case that women bring with them a set of experiences different in important ways from those of many of their male peers. “If you’ve never tried to put a buggy on a bus, you don’t really understand what many women’s experience of public transport is,” Childs says, adding that there’s a burgeoning argument for childcare to be thought about as infrastructure – not just roads and rail.  Sexual violence and harassment are another reason women and girls experience cities differently from men. Henriette Reker, mayor of Cologne, was stabbed in the neck by a male attacker the day before last year’s election. Following the sex attacks in the city at New Year, when almost 500 sexual assaults were reported, Reker was lambasted for her remarks about keeping strange men at arm’s length, which were interpreted as “victim-blaming”. She has since said she thinks her words were a subconscious reflection of her own trauma. When I ask what lessons she took from New Year, she says the attacks are “still very much present in our heads”.  Ana Olivera, until last year mayor of Montevideo, capital of Uruguay, is another mayor to have focused attention on violence against women, by offering psychological therapy to survivors of sexual violence. But she describes rights for women as part of a larger struggle that includes racial equality and LGBT inclusion: “I don’t see women’s interests as a trade-off against the interests of other groups.”  On the contrary, supporters of women’s representation in politics believe women can act as a kind of bridgehead for other under-represented groups – older people, children, racial and religious minorities – because although women are not a minority, they are more likely than men to have experienced social exclusion and disempowerment. Olivera names among her proudest achievements as Montevideo mayor a skate park, proposed by a group of teenage skateboarders who won approval and a budget from the city.  If a couple of themes recur in talking to female mayors, one is that they have often been underestimated, if not insulted; another is their sense that women can bring a different, less overtly combative and more consensual approach to government. Also, there is their pride at having blazed a trail.  Cyvette Gibson, Paynesville, Liberia (population 347,000)  “In parts of Africa there are still prejudices about women in leadership roles and doubts about the impact we can make. In Liberia our male counterparts have realised we are a force to reckon with – but we still have difficulties. About a year and a half ago, I had a minister come to my office and I had another meeting that ran over so I was late. I apologised, and the minister admonished me for keeping him waiting and told me to get him a bottle of water. I could not believe that he spoke to me like this, I almost fell through the floor.”  Henriette Reker, Cologne, Germany (population 1 million)  “Even some men said it was about time that Cologne got its first female mayor – and the voters agreed. But first and foremost you vote for a candidate’s personality. My sex doesn’t shape my style as much as you might think, although there are a couple of recognisable female traits. As a woman you have learned to be a good listener, to spot someone’s interest and to bring different parties around the same table without producing a loser.”  Ana Olivera, Montevideo, Uruguay (population 1.3 million)  “Of course I faced discrimination while campaigning. In the focus groups we conducted, many people felt I wouldn’t be able to deal with the unions. It was always the same issue: that I didn’t have enough authority. At one point, a reporter asked me, ‘do you really think Montevideo is ready for a woman as mayor?’ When I took office a women’s rights group in Montevideo called ComunaMujer gave me a wooden key to the city. When I left office, they gave me the same key, but made out of steel. That felt symbolic.”  Megan Barry, Nashville and Davidson County, US (population 1.95 million)  “It’s hard to know whether being a woman makes a difference as I’ve never been anything else. Saying that, often women bring a different perspective, and I’ll give you an example: recently I was on a job site looking at a sewer and there was a big sign that said ‘men working’ so I asked the men I was with what was wrong with the sign, and some of them noticed it was old or that it was chipped, but they didn’t notice the wording. We’ve now gone to national standard of ‘workers present’ for all our signs in Nashville and I had that ‘men working’ sign delivered to my office and hung on the wall.”  Vera Baboun, Bethlehem, Palestine (population 27,000)  “Leading the municipality gives me the chance to achieve things, and create opportunities on the ground. I enjoy witnessing change - even when I open a new road I enjoy it. It’s an abnormal situation in Bethlehem, people need a permit to leave the city, there is the wall to the north and settlements all over the place. When you achieve things on the ground that help people to see life normally, that is a joy.”  Dorothy Thornhill, Watford, UK (population 95,000)  “Mayoral leadership is very visible, it’s about walking down the street and somebody saying ‘you’ve made a right muck-up of that’. They feel they can comment on local decisions and I think that’s great. It’s my job to interfere in everything and I do. Being mayor is about being the glue of the town, bringing the right people together, it’s like being a brokerage of partnerships. I wanted to restore people’s faith in the council. What people said to me was that Watford was a town that had a downer on itself and part of what we’ve tried to do is to make people proud of Watford.”  Additional reporting by Drew Reed in Argentina. Guardian Cities is a member of the Habitat III Journalism Project. Read more about the project here
From Paris to Rome and Bethlehem to Baghdad, a wave of new female mayors is taking office and shaking up old assumptions about what matters to cities. So what impact have they had?