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 1966 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 recent elections of Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah as Namibia's first female president marks a significant moment in a growing global trend of women taking positions as leaders. This growing number of female leaders raises questions about the gender dynamics in international relations. Toward this end, I argue how gender stereotypes and sexism that lead to political violence against female leaders influence their decisions between imposing economic sanctions and taking military action in addressing international crises depending on the gender of their adversary. Using an original survey experiment and formal modeling, I show that female leaders take military action against their male adversaries to overcome gender-based challenges that depict them as "weak" during international crises. I find evidence that female leaders pay higher audience costs for imposing economic sanctions compared to male-male dyads. These findings highlight the unique challenges that female leaders face while managing international crises. Further, I develop formal models to demonstrate these dyadic relationships between leaders' gender and foreign policy choices, incorporating these gender-based biases into the crisis bargaining model. The findings have critical implications for debates over the foreign policy decisions of female leaders.