Women at War and Peace

Are female leaders more likely to support humanitarian military interventions? Toward this end, I show how female leaders engage in humanitarian military interventions to overcome “double-bind gender bias” and fulfill their surrogate representation. I suggest that humanitarian military interventions serve as a unique opportunity for female leaders to demonstrate leadership expectations (use of military force) and align with gender roles (addressing human rights violations). Using data from 1947 to 2005, the empirical findings from weighted logit regressions indicate that countries with female leaders are around three times more likely to engage in military interventions to address humanitarian crises. These findings point to particular strategies adopted by female leaders to navigate gender stereotypes and sexism against themselves. This study contributes to the broader literature on gender and foreign policy by examining how female leaders approach humanitarian interventions. It also extends the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda by showing that its principles can be reflected in executive decisions about when and how to use military force.

The growing number of women leaders has attracted considerable attention from scholars and the public. A growing literature on gender and conflict suggests that women leaders initiate and escalate interstate conflicts to navigate gender stereotypes that depict them as ill-fitted and incompetent as national leaders. Toward this end, I show how female leaders engage in formal military alliances while overcoming persistent gender stereotypes and sexist attitudes directed at them. I test the theoretical expectations using data on women leaders and Alliance Treaty Obligations and Provisions (ATOP) from 1950 to 2018. The findings support the argument that female leaders are less likely to engage in defense pacts and/or consultation agreements. This study contributes to the broader literature on gender and foreign policy, focusing on gender, security, and military alliances.

The recent elections of Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah as Namibia's first female president mark a significant moment in a growing global trend of women taking positions as leaders. Yet, gender stereotypes and sexism continue to question the capability and authority of women as national leaders. Toward this end, building on "double-bind gender bias" that emerges due to persistent gender stereotypes and sexist attitudes toward female leaders, I developed a gendered foreign policy framework to capture how female leaders decide whether to impose economic sanctions or resort to military force in international crises, depending on the gender of their adversaries. Using an original survey experiment, I aim to show that (1) female leaders face greater audience costs for imposing economic sanctions (often perceived as overly conciliatory and not calculated, contradicting masculine leadership expectations) than their male counterparts, and (2) audience costs are shaped by the gender of the adversary: female leaders face greater audience costs for using military force against other women than a male-male dyad, given that such foreign policy decisions might be seen as overly aggressive, which conflicts with traditional gender roles.