Dalai Lama Says Women Empathize and Men ‘Kill’

The Dalai Lama said Friday that more women are needed in leadership roles because they are more compassionate than men, who are valued instead for their ability to “kill.”

“Women have been shown to be more sensitive to others’ suffering, whereas, warriors celebrated for killing their opponents are almost always men,” he tweeted in celebration of International Women’s Day celebrated on March 8.

“We need to see more women in leadership roles and more closely involved in education about compassion,” he said.

This is not the first time that the Buddhist leader has vocalized his support for female leadership, going so far as to suggest that his successor as Tibet’s spiritual leader could well be a woman.

In 2013, the Dalai Lama was asked about Australia’s gender battles under then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard. He said at the time that the world faces a “moral crisis” of inequality and suffering and needs leaders with compassion.

Ms. Gillard, who ended her term as prime minister just weeks later, said that conservatives would marginalize women and set back abortion laws, while accusing opposition leader Tony Abbott of a pattern of misogynistic behavior.

The exiled 77-year-old, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who fled Tibet for India in 1959 when China took control, was in Australia on a speaking tour at the time.

Two years later, the Tibetan leader added an odd condition to his earlier statement, saying that if his successor is a woman she must be “very, very attractive” because otherwise she is “not much use.”

In an interview with the BBC, the Dalai Lama recalled telling a French journalist a decade or so earlier that having a female Dalai Lama was important because women have a greater “biological” capacity “to show affection … compassion.”

“I think female[s] should take more important role and then – I told the reporter – if a female does come her face should be very, very attractive.”

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