Gender, sexism, and war

Abstract

We analyze a model of leader gender and crisis bargaining under asymmetric information. There are no essential differences between the sexes in their willingness to use force, but sexist leaders receive a subjective boost for defeating female leaders in war and pay a subjective cost for defeat. We show that this hostile sexism can lead to war for two reasons, first by offering sufficient private benefits to make peace impossible and second by influencing an uninformed leader’s willingness to risk war. We also show that (a) the effect of leader sex on disputes and war depends on the distribution of power, (b) sexist leaders may initiate disputes at less favorable distributions of power than non-sexist leaders, and (c) sexist leaders adopt bargaining strategies that make it difficult for women to cultivate and benefit from reputations for resolve, even in the absence of sex differences in the willingness to use force.

More Equality for Women Does Mean Less War: Descriptive Representation, Legislative Votes, and International Conflict

“…Indeed, women's representation in leadership and legislative positions are shown to have opposite effects; while women leaders have higher propensities for aggressive foreign policies, 10 women's legislative representation correlates with peace. 11 These contrastive findings are not surprising given the institutional differences; while women leaders are responsible for foreign policies and incentivized to cultivate a hawkish reputation and obtain better foreign policy outcomes (Blair and Schwartz 2023;Reiter and Wolford 2022;Schwartz and Blair 2020), women legislators have no or only limited power over foreign policies. Given the limited institutional power, foreign policy outcomes are unlikely to be attributed to individual legislators, and hence, legislators are more concerned about their own or voters' preferences.…”

Introduction to special issue: New research on leaders and peace science

“…The focus on how individual-level traits or characteristics drive leaders’ decisions typically results in this type of research identifying previously unrecognized relationships that cannot easily be explained by the decisions of governments, regimes, or states. For example, theoretical and empirical results concerning how women leaders influence patterns of interstate conflict do not recast neo-realist or other state-level arguments and findings so much as highlight relationships that are directly attributable to the individuals who lead countries (Post and Sen, 2020; Reiter and Wolford, 2022).…”