Nothing is as dangerous as half truths so let's look at what really happened as far your example of female leadership in Muslim countries.
Yes, at first glance 3 of the 4 countries in your example (Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh) have "elected" a female as president/prime minister. However, without exception these women were the daughters or widows of the previous heads of state. Their appointments represent the feudal tradition of inheriting power by family relation rather than popular vote as you are implying.
The 4th country, India, is an even worse example. Not only muslims are a minority in India (a quick lookup tells me between 15% and 20%), prior to the elections the muslim-indian leadership demanded that the female candidate be disqualified because she made some sort of a statement against veils.
Given that the US has frequently, and recently, elected children of previous presidents, and that the only serious contender for a female president was the wife of a former one, I think it hardly fair to discount other countries elected leaders on those grounds alone.
As for feudal traditions, all of those countries had been European colonies for about a century prior to organizing under their current systems. In the case of Indonesia, their first female president began 34 years after her father left office and after three other presidents were in office. She then lost the elections after three years in office. That hardly sounds "feudal".
And yes, Muslims are a minority in India. I assumed anyone reading this thread was aware of that.
My point is this: if these countries are one way or another electing female leadership, then it indicates that the issue of the views on women in those societies is more multidimensional than you're painting it. At the very least it's not consistent across the range from Western Africa to Eastern Asia. The problems are real, but they're best addressed when approached through examining the situations in their complexity, rather than trying to reduce them to a single wacky-sane spectrum.
This thread typifies why I think politics should be kept off of HN. It just degenerates into this sort of stuff where everyone's regurgitating what they already believe and on the whole the net amount of respect for one another goes down.
"We can't criticize them b/c we do something loosely similar" is a bad argument to make. Really, we should criticize both cultures.
Also, topics that are traditionally hard to discuss online should be discussed more here. It is mostly on HN where I've seen people make an effort to understand both sides.
Yes, at first glance 3 of the 4 countries in your example (Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh) have "elected" a female as president/prime minister. However, without exception these women were the daughters or widows of the previous heads of state. Their appointments represent the feudal tradition of inheriting power by family relation rather than popular vote as you are implying.
The 4th country, India, is an even worse example. Not only muslims are a minority in India (a quick lookup tells me between 15% and 20%), prior to the elections the muslim-indian leadership demanded that the female candidate be disqualified because she made some sort of a statement against veils.