Leadership Quote by Emma Bonino

Bonino’s line lands like a compliment and a provocation at once: “positive” is the word of someone staking a claim in a room that expects her to hedge. Calling flexibility “a feminine characteristic” isn’t a neutral observation about gender; it’s a political move that weaponizes a stereotype by flipping its usual valuation. In public life, “flexible” can be read as adaptable, pragmatic, coalition-savvy - or as slippery, unserious, not quite “leadership material.” Bonino drags that double meaning into the open and dares you to decide which reading you’re using.

The intent feels strategic. In male-coded political cultures, strength is often performed as rigidity: the refusal to bend, the preference for clean lines over messy compromise. Bonino, a veteran of Italian and European politics, knows that governing is mostly the opposite - bargaining, recalibrating, building temporary majorities, absorbing contradiction. By marking flexibility as “feminine,” she asserts that what gets dismissed as “women’s” behavior is exactly what complex democracies require.

The subtext is also defensive in a sharp way: if women are stereotyped as accommodating, she reframes accommodation as competence, not deference. That reframing carries a risk - it can essentialize women and let institutions off the hook by treating systemic barriers as personality differences. But that tension is part of why the line works. It’s not trying to be a timeless truth; it’s a pointed intervention in how power is narrated, and who gets credited for the unglamorous skill of making politics function.