A Woman President

This segment was originally broadcast on April 23, 2006.

The following is a weekly 60 Minutes commentary by CBS News correspondent Andy Rooney.

There has never been one American woman smart enough to be president? There isn't a single woman alive as capable as George W. Bush?

We don't know who is smarter, men or women. There have been IQ tests over the years, but the results never conclusively determine any intellectual superiority for either sex. It's interesting, though, that last year for every 133,000 women who graduated from college, only 100,000 men graduated.

Our failure to elect a woman isn't because of any conspiracy by men. There are 146 million men in the United States and 151 million women and one of the things that makes it strange that we have never had a woman president is that more women than men vote. It must be that even women don't vote for a woman.

If there's some doubt about whether men or women are smarter, there's no doubt about other male and female characteristics. For example, it seems as though women are nicer people than men. They're apparently more honest than men, too. There are 2,270,000 people in prison in the United States and only seven percent of them are women. The other 93 percent are men. Of course, it could be that women aren't more honest, they're just smarter at not getting caught.

Women's brains don't go about solving problems the same way men's brains do - that's a personal opinion of mine - but it would be hard to say which way is better.

We're one of the few countries in the world that has never had a woman chief executive.

Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister of Great Britain three times. Lots of countries have elected women presidents - Argentina, Iceland, the Philippines, Nicaragua, Ecuador. Right now Finland, Ireland, Liberia and Chile have women presidents.

Not that I'm going to move to any of those countries because of it.
By Andy Rooney