Gender, sexism, and war 1
| Date | 01 January 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/09516298211061151 |
| Author | Dan Reiter,Scott Wolford |
| Published date | 01 January 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Gender, sexism, and war
1
Dan Reiter
Emory University, USA
Scott Wolford
University of Texas, USA
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 pri-
vate benefits to make peace impossible and second by influencing an uninformed leader’s willing-
ness 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 dif-
ficult for women to cultivate and benefit from reputations for resolve, even in the absence of sex
differences in the willingness to use force.
1. Introduction
Tradition holds that women bolster peace and men pursue war. This is out of step with
contemporary perspectives on gender, which reject the essentialist assumption that
equates biological sex with socially-constructed gender, as well as war, which treat con-
flict as a strategic process. Yet as more women become national leaders, the need to
understand gender’s effect on crisis bargaining is more urgent (see also Cohen and
Karim, 2021; Dube and Harish, 2020). In the last decade, Poland’s Ewa Kopacz,
South Korea’s Park Geun-hye, and Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen all faced possible crises
with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, and China’s Xi Jinping,
Corresponding author:
Scott Wolford, University of Texas, 158 W 21st St A1800 Austin, Texas 78712-1139, USA.
Email: swolford@austin.utexas.edu
Article
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2022, Vol. 34(1) 59–77
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/ 09516298211061151
journals.sagepub.com/home/jtp
respectively, yet we lack a clear theoretical account of how gender politics shapes the
onset and escalation of international crises.
We explore this question with a game-theoretic model of the relationship between
leader gender and war. It is to our knowledge the first formal model of gender and inter-
national conflict, and it allows us both to account for strategic dynamics between states
during crises that may lead to war and to relax the essentialist assumption that men and
women differ in their willingness to use force. The key moving part is another insight new
to the study of gender and war: the interaction of hostile sexism with uncertainty over a
leader’s resolve. We incorporate from gender studies the proposition that sexist men are
especially concerned with dominating and avoiding defeat at the hands of women, such
that a sexist leader receives a subjective benefit from defeating female leaders in war and
pays a subjective cost for losing to them. Therefore, gender enters the story not through
any underlying difference between men and women but through a foreign leader’s
sexism, which interacts with that same foreign leader’s uncertainty over a domestic
leader’s willingness to use force in sequential crises. Outcomes of interest include the
initiation of disputes and the escalation of disputes to war, as well as the cultivation, attri-
bution, and distributive benefits of reputations for resolve.
Our model yields several results. First, sexism can influence crisis bargaining in two
distinct ways: (a) a private-benefits mechanism in which sexist leaders provoke war
regardless of their beliefs about opponents’resolve and (b) a screening mechanism in
which sexism alters leaders’incentives to risk war against female opponents. Second,
sexists are willing to risk war when they’ve got a sufficient chance of victory, but
they’re less likely to risk it when defeat is too likely. The effect of sexism on both the
initiation and escalation of disputes depends on the distribution of military power,
which helps explain the apparent lack of a clear relationship between leader gender
and war in observational work. Third, and related, the most sexist leaders win more of
the conflicts they initiate than non-sexists, but moderately sexist leaders lose more of
the conflicts they initiate than non-sexists. Finally, sexist leaders make such aggressive
demands of women that even dovish types reject them, undermining the informational
value of fighting and causing female leaders to struggle in equilibrium to cultivate repu-
tations for resolve as effectively as male leaders.
2. Gender, Game Theory, and Conflict
Feminist scholars have critiqued the use of “rational”models of decision-making since
the 18th century (Jones, 2004; England, 1989; Sjoberg, 2013; Tickner, 2001). Yet not
all scholars, feminist or otherwise, see rational choice and feminist perspectives as neces-
sarily opposed; some, in fact, see rational choice as a tool that can develop ideas about the
role of gender in preference formation and strategic behavior (Cudd, 2002, 412-413;
Driscoll and Krook, 2012, 2015-2016). Still, few game-theoretic models incorporate
gender, despite their strengths in modeling the interaction between power and ideas in
politics. Fréchette et al. (2008) model the effects of male bias in legislatures, and
Kanthak and Krause (2011) use a game to describe the effects of legislator gender on
coordination. When it comes to IR, Sjoberg (2013) acknowledges the possibility that
“feminist war theorizing…is rationalist and constructivist”(55), but to our knowledge
60 Journal of Theoretical Politics 34(1)
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