Gendering hawkishness in the war room: Evidence from Pakistani politicians

Can representation in foreign policy deliberations – in particular, increased female representation – impact deliberators’ support for interstate conflict resolution? While existing work on gender representation in IR suggests that increased female representation should moderate intragroup hawkishness, making conflict resolution more viable, I offer empirical evidence that qualifies this idea, based on a survey experiment on 149 male and 55 female elite Pakistani legislators. Politicians of both sexes were randomly assigned to ‘listen in’ on a hypothetical national security deliberation that was either all-male or gender-mixed. I find that politicians’ decisionmaking in these hypothetical committees was informed simultaneously by notions of committee competence and by inferences about the social desirability of hawkish outcomes in deliberative settings. Specifically, respondents assigned to gender-mixed committees became less supportive of external conflict resolution. I show how different mechanisms accounted for this increased hawkishness for men and women. Female politicians assigned to gender-mixed committees became more conscious and wary of how their participation, the result of increased representation, would be perceived, compelling them to opt for more hawkish policies. Male politicians, in contrast, attempted to overcompensate for the increased visibility of female representation by resorting to greater levels of aggression.