Who Leads the World?

How come Pakistan had a female leader before the United States?
Margaret Thatcher ruled England before I was driving a car. Actually she came to power in 1979, so there was a lot of other stuff I wasn't doing yet, like probably dressing myself.
We reprimand Muslim nations for their backwards thinking and repressive societies, but it's Pakistan who elected a female leader twice already, to our zero. And Benazir Bhutto is coming back.
Golda Meir. Angela Merkel in Germany. Corazon Aquino in the Philippines, Asia's first female president. I was 11 when she was elected (and by now able to dress myself, thanks). Canada's had a female PM too. Senegal. Haiti. Peru. Burundi! Even the Communists managed a female Prime Minister in Yugoslavia for four years.
All this depressing realization comes upon me from Wikipedia.
I'm so perturbed when I hear people say that Hillary's just too cold for them. Or some equally nonchalant, weak reason not to vote for her. You don't have to vote for her because she's a woman, but just come up with a better reason to vote against her. You're electing a president, not picking a BFF. Or as Jason added in his commentary, "You're not going to sleep with her." (This post, btw, is his idea, perhaps to curtail the rant he saw me about to launch into when I saw the homepage of today's NYT with the Pakistan headline.)

So who leads the world? As much as Americans may laud ourselves for being a champion of equal rights and a leader of all sorts of things, it seems as though we're oddly far behind. And the answer to "who leads the world?" at least in other parts of the globe is, sometimes, a woman.
Why has it taken us so long to get this far?