All in the family: What many Asian female leaders share (PHOTOS)
Park Geun-Hye, a popular lawmaker of South Korea’s ruling Grand National Party, burns an incense for her father, former president Park Chung-Hee, at a private home in the southern city of Gumi on March 25, 2008.
SEOUL — As Park Geun-hye becomes South Korea's first female leader, she joins a string of powerful female Asian politicians who have kept it in the family, following their fathers or husbands or preceding their sons into the realm of public service.
"Park Geun-hye's rise closely follows a pattern in male-dominated Asia of the daughters and husbands of national figureheads becoming powerful through association," GlobalPost's East Asia correspondent Geoffrey Cain points out.
"What's interesting is that all their fathers and brothers were once considered national heroes but later assassinated or exiled somehow."
From Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of killed Burmese pro-democracy icon Aung San, to Indonesia's Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of the first president of Indonesia, Sukarno, here are six female politicians who have made political office a family affair.
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