The Queens’ gambit: Women leadership, gender expectations, and interstate conflict

Abstract

If more women were put in states’ leadership positions, would there be fewer militarised interstate disputes? The findings of this study suggest an affirmative answer to this question but for reasons that are different from the arguments associating women with peace. We derive our expectations from the ‘role incongruity’ perspective detailing the impact of gender stereotypes on individuals’ assessment of leaders and their decisions. Due to gendered expectations of leadership, ‘role incongruity’ can contribute to the escalation of militarised disputes in state dyads where one leader is male and the other is female, but its impact is mitigated in joint women-led state dyads. Our contributions to the scholarship on gender and conflict lie in illuminating theoretically how the threats arising from gender stereotypes can be reduced in all-women dyads and testing this relationship on state dyads between years 1966 and 2014.