Hillary Clinton may have cracked the glass ceiling, but Central Asian politician Roza Otunbayeva, the newly recognized leader of Kyrgyzstan, broke though.

Following April’s coup, Otunbayeva was officially recognized as the new Kyrgyzstani head of state by the US and other foreign diplomats. A few weeks ago, her predecessor, the deposed president Kurmanbek Bakiyev, left the country.

This was, by all accounts, an important and much-needed transfer of power. But it left us surprised — for a reason that hasn’t received much mention in regular outlets.

It wasn’t that someone beat the US to the punch in selecting a female leader, plenty of other countries have already done that. It was that the US was beaten to the punch by the world capitol of bride-napping, a place where more than half of all marriages began with abduction.

Bride kidnapping in Kyrgystan is a fairly well-documented in phenomenon. In 2005 the New York Times reported that it was by far the most common in the countryside and that some of the kidnappings were at least semi-voluntary, with 80 percent of kidnapped women eventually relenting and accepting their new husbands.

The practice is known as “ala kachuu,” which translates roughly as “grab and run,” writes the Times. It’s been rising steadily over the last 50 years and now comprises about one third of marriages. It accounts for about half of existing marriages.

The video below describes the process and films an actual kidnapping.

So how to explain Roza Otunbayeva? A powerful, respected female leader in a land where courtship sometimes means hiding out in the bushes with rope and a blind fold?

Network 20/20 asked Kyrgyzstan experts Susan Thieme, author of “Living in Transition: How Kyrgyz Women Juggle Their Different Roles in a Multi-local Setting,” and her colleague Bernd Steimann at the University of Zurich to reconcile Otunbayeva’s rise with this unsavory local practice.

Steimann explained that what seemed like a paradox, was actually mostly a relatively recent backlash against the USSR. For many countries, Soviet occupation brought mixed results, and for some, it represented a high point for women’s rights. When Soviet rule ended, many nations, including Kyrgyzstan, made an effort to return to their pre-USSR traditions. Ergo, a surge of bride kidnapping, as opposed to a few of the more progressive ideas that were mandated by the Soviets.

Steimann makes another important point, and one that’s not without controversy: the much-talked-about Kyrgyzstani “tradition” of bride kidnapping, he says, was actually mostly fabricated. It wasn’t deeply ingrained in the country’s culture before the Soviets took hold. Instead, he suggests, it might simply be a manifestation of a culture of sexism that’s common across the globe.

Sexism that is, of course, also found in the US–where the glass ceiling remains intact.

Steimann’s excerpted email to Network 20/20:

There’s not much of a paradox. Throughout Soviet times, women have always been involved in economic production and political processes and there was a considerably high degree of gender equity, also in the Kyrgyz SSR.

Although this has changed in many respects after the socialist breakdown, there were and still are many women with an excellent education and working in leading positions, also in the countryside.

By contrast, the habit of bride kidnapping is a rather recent phenomenon, and although many people claim it to be traditional, it has no roots in Kyrgyz tradition (see references below). This is also why many rural and urban people distance themselves from this practice; at the same time, sexism is manifest in both the rural and the urban context – but that’s not much different in Europe and the U.S., and we nevertheless have female leaders, don’t we?

He cites this paper: Kleinbach, R. and L. Salimjanova (2007). “Kyz ala kachuu and adat: non-consensual bride kidnapping and tradition in Kyrgyzstan.” Central Asian Survey 26(2): 217-233.