Gender, violence, and international crisis

Women work for peace, and men wage war-cooperative women, conflictual men. These images pervade conventional wisdom about the efficacy of women in lea dership roles and decision-making environments, but imagery is not always g rounded in reality. Feminist international relations literature is examined to understand how domestic gender equality may help predict a state's inte rnational crisis behavior. The authors use the record of female leaders as primary decision makers during international crises and then test the relat ionship between domestic gender equality and a state's use of violence inte rnationally. The International Crisis Behavior (ICB) data set and multinomi al logistic regression are used to test the level of violence exhibited dur ing international crises by states with varying levels of domestic gender e quality. Results show that the severity of violence in crisis decreases as domestic gender equality increases.