When I was listening to The New York Times podcast “The Argument” that was critical of New York mayor Bill De Blasio’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, I asked myself, “I wonder if the decisions would have been different if a woman had been in charge?”

I had supported Christine Quinn to replace Michael Bloomberg as mayor of New York, but she lost to De Blasio. I had supported Zephyr Teachout when she ran against New York governor Andrew Cuomo in 2014 and lost. I had supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. At the beginning of the current Democratic presidential nomination process I supported Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, much to the horror of my conservative friends. I supported all of these women because I have long felt that old, white men have screwed up our cities, states, countries and the world long enough and that we needed women in charge in order to build a more compassionate, empathetic and equal world.

Therefore, I created several spreadsheets to see if countries, U.S. states and cities were safer during the pandemic with women in charge. The metric I used to assess safety were COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 people because this is a much better metric than total COVID-19 deaths, which of course depend on population.

In the United States, the average number of deaths per 100,000 people as of May 22 in the 50 states was 22.5. The average number of deaths in the nine states with female governors was 18.3, or 24 percent better. Therefore, my initial reaction was that my hypothesis that we’re safer with women in charge was correct.

However, I realized that correlation does not mean causation, and that there was also a strong correlation between low deaths per 100,000 and a state’s population — the lower a state’s population, generally the lower the COVID-19 deaths per 100.000. Therefore, it’s probably OK to say that’s it’s safer to live in a state with a small population and with a female governor. In other words, it’s safer to live anywhere in the U.S.A. other than in New York City, the world’s most dangerous city where the deaths-per-100,000 (193.71) are so awful that they skew averages and make America look worse than other countries. You can check out my spreadsheets in the Publications section of my website.

I looked at the top 25 American cities to see if having a female mayor made cities safer. I saw the same pattern as in states. The average deaths per 100,000 people in the top 25 cities as of May 22 was 77.4, and the average deaths per 100,000 people in the six cities with female mayors was 44.3, or a big 75 percent advantage. But, again as in states, the six cities with female mayors were not New York and were in smaller cities, with one exception, Chicago.

In six Asian countries — China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Taiwan — the average deaths per 100,000 people was a mere .38, which means that these Asian countries did an infinitely better job of managing COVID-19 than America did. We may not be certain that the numbers from China or India are real, but they are generally in line with numbers of the other Asian countries. Of the six Asian countries I looked at, the only one that had a female head of state was Taiwan, the smallest of the six by far. Taiwan had only seven deaths, or an incredibly low 0.03 deaths per 100,000.

In 21 counties in Western Europe, the average deaths per 100,000 people was 22.35. In the eight countries with female heads of state, the average deaths per 100,000 was a comparatively miniscule 4.16. This low 4.16 average included Belgium which has a female head of state and which led Western Europe in deaths per 100,000 with 83.25. I could find no clues as why Belgium was such an outlier, but what it means is that the Belgium numbers bring up the others, which, in turn, shows what a great job the other female heads of state did, especially Angela Merkel of Germany, Western Europe’s largest country with just 9.96 deaths per 100,000.

Scandinavian countries provide another example of places being safer with women in charge. Of the four Scandinavia countries, three — Denmark, Norway and Finland — have female heads of state. The average deaths per 100,000 for the four countries as of May 22 was 14.9. The average of the three headed by women was 4.95, a whopping 300 percent advantage.

Of course I have to admit that the three Scandinavian countries with women in charge are half as big as Sweden, the one with man in charge. So, consistent with U.S. states and cities, and the six Asian countries, women tend to be in charge of smaller places. Therefore, it probably makes sense to say that it’s safer to live where there are fewer people and where a woman is in charge.

The other thing I realized in doing this analysis is that the media I am most familiar with — The New York Times, the Washington Post, the podcasts I listen to and the “PBS NewHour” — focus on trashing Trump’s historic incompetence and complete lack of empathy in managing the COVID-19 pandemic. They also seem to focus on praising male governors such as New York’s media center darling, Andrew Cuomo, California’s Gavin Newsom, Ohio’s Mike DeWine, and Washington’s Jay Islee, but ignore the story of women who are doing a fabulous job of keeping us safe: London Breed, Mayor of San Francisco; Jenny Durkan, Mayor of Seattle; Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany; Zuzana Caputova, President of Slovakia; and Katerina Sakellaropoulou, President of Greece.

As usual, the media are controlled mostly by white men, thus women don’t seem to get the credit they deserve. We’ll never know the counterfactual, or what would have happened when the COVID-19 virus hit if Hillary Clinton had been president, or Zephyr Teachout had been governor of New York or Christine Quinn had been mayor of New York City. However, we do know this: it couldn’t have possibly been any worse.

Let’s put more women in charge. We’ll get more compassion, more empathy and more equality.