Do women leaders enact more hawkish foreign policies? Some research argues women leaders are more likely to adopt aggressive and masculine characteristics to obtain national office. As a result, women leaders should exhibit more hawkish behavior than men. In this study we re-examine the relationship between the women leaders and foreign policy by focusing on military spending behavior. We argue that conventional empirical methods, such as linear regression, are ill-suited to examine data on women leaders and military spending. These methods are sensitive to outliers and small sample sizes: two characteristics of women leadership. To address these issues, we use the synthetic control method to estimate the military spending behavior of women leaders. By creating unique synthetic counterfactuals for three prominent women leaders – Thatcher, Gandhi, and Meir – we analyze what would have happened if a particular state had a male leader. Generalizing beyond these cases, we also conduct a multiple treatment test that examines the effect of women leadership jointly across multiple countries and time periods. We find that women leaders do not spend more on the military than men. We analyze plausible explanations of these null results and discuss their implications.

女性领导人会制定更鹰派的外交政策吗？一些研究认为，女性领导人更有可能采取积极进取和男性化的特征来获得国家职位。因此，女性领导人应该表现出比男性更鹰派的行为。在本研究中，我们通过关注军费开支行为来重新审视女性领导人与外交政策之间的关系。我们认为，传统的实证方法，如线性回归，不适合检查女性领导人和军费开支的数据。这些方法对异常值和小样本量敏感：女性领导力的两个特征。为了解决这些问题，我们使用综合控制方法来估计女性领导人的军费开支行为。通过为三位杰出的女性领袖——撒切尔、甘地、和梅尔——我们分析如果某个特定州有男性领导人会发生什么。除了这些案例之外，我们还进行了一项多重治疗测试，以检查女性领导力在多个国家和时间段内共同产生的影响。我们发现女性领导人在军事上的花费并不比男性多。我们分析了对这些无效结果的合理解释并讨论了它们的含义。