External Security Threats and Attitudes Toward Male and Female Leaders

• In Event: Gendered Attitudes: Origins & Implications

Abstract

Despite progress in the election of women to positions of power around the world, prejudice against female leaders pervades most societies. The extent of bias against women in politics, however, varies across countries. What explains cross-national variation in gender attitudes towards male and female leaders? We focus on a country’s external security environment, a factor that has been overlooked in the global scholarship on gender unequal attitudes. Previous studies in the U.S. well recognize the existence of gender stereotypes linking men to greater competence in defense and the military, and that these stereotypes benefit male candidates in times of heightened security threat. Nevertheless, the relationship between a country’s security context and unfavorable attitudes toward female leaders has not received much empirical attention beyond the U.S. case. A cross-national analysis of the role of a country’s threat environment would be helpful for understanding why some countries exhibit greater bias against women leaders than others.

Using World Values Survey data for 222,871 individuals in 83 countries, we test whether the presence of external threats corresponds with higher preferences for male over female leaders. We find that the more hostile a country’s security environment, the more individuals prefer male over female leaders. Our results are robust to including known individual-level correlates of gender attitudes (age, sex, level of education, marital status, religiosity) and country-level variables (level of wealth, level of democracy, women’s legislative representation). Preferences for male leaders are context dependent, and the security of a country forms an important part of that context.

Authors

• Alice Kang, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

• Nam Kyu Kim, Sungkyunkwan University