Centre of Canadian Studies

Description

There is a considerable amount of literature that suggests that women are evaluated based on the emotionality of their responses in political settings. This may, however, differ by the political or policy context at hand. For example, in social policy, women’s perceived emotionality or empathy may work to their advantage, creating a perceived congruence between women as representatives and women as knowledgeable about the field (Campbell et al 2009). On the other hand, in the foreign policy and military conflict literatures (Blair and Schwartz 2023; Schramm and Stark 2020), women representatives have been said to “play against type” and be more assertive or aggressive to “compete” with male leaders. Oddly, given their contemporary salience, we have less information about how gendered representation operates in international economic or trade conflicts (though see Guisinger 2017 for. Robust discussion on trade and gender). Using a 2x2 survey experiment on a nationally-representative Canadian sample, we explore this question in the context of the ongoing contemporary trade conflict between Canada and the United States. We test for the presence of a gender penalty – such that women are evaluated as less competent than men – when the political representative either capitulates or is aggressive, but do not anticipate a gender penalty when the representative is cooperative. We find evidence of a gender penalty among Conservative respondents (though not for other partisans) when leaders adopt a conciliatory or cooperative approach, but no gender penalty when leaders adopt an aggressive approach (consistent across partisan groups). We suggest that the conditions under which women leaders experience a gender penalty for their foreign policy approaches are more limited than previously believed and must account for the specific circumstances of the conflict, with trade policy opening up a site for further exploration of the gender representation literature in international relations.