Gender, Media Evaluations, and Security Crises
Are Leaders Framed in a Gender-Biased Way When Addressing External Security Threats, and If So, How? (JMP)
This project examines how international security crises are associated with changes in how political leaders are evaluated in the media. Focusing on repeated external security challenges faced by national leaders, the project explores whether evaluative narratives differ systematically across leaders and contexts. The analysis draws on an original corpus of domestic and international news coverage and applies text-as-data and machine learning approaches to characterize patterns in framing and tone. Rather than testing a single mechanism, the project maps how multiple dimensions of evaluation shift during crisis periods.
Gender Bias Updating in Security Leadership
Are gender stereotypes about female leaders in security leadership positions immutable?
The project examines how the public processes counter-stereotypical factual information when evaluating leadership competence in a policy domain strongly associated with masculinity and elite expertise. Existing research has extensively examined motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, and gender stereotypes independently. Still, we know less about how individuals update evaluations of elite political competence in high-stakes security domains when confronted with information that challenges preexisting stereotypes. The project, therefore, examines the conditions under which factual information succeeds, fails, or produces resistance and backfire effects in evaluations of security leadership.
Gendered Strategies of Political Survival
When Gender, Strategy and Blame Collide:
Conjunctural Causes of Political Removal under Security Threats
This project explores how leaders’ strategic responses to external security threats relate to political accountability and survival. The study examines how crisis management strategies interact with gendered expectations to shape post-crisis evaluations and political outcomes. Drawing on original leader-level data and media-based indicators, the project focuses on patterns of accountability rather than specific causal pathways. The goal is to better understand how gender shapes the political risks leaders face during periods of heightened security concern.
Gender and Global Environmental Leadership
Talking green, leading strong :
Gender and Strategic Environmental Communication in the UN General Debate
Co-author: Callista Chim
How does gender shape environmental policy positions in international institutions? Existing research on public opinion finds that women express greater concern for environmental issues than men and that greater female political representation is associated with stronger environmental policy outcomes. Yet, we do not know whether these gendered preferences are reflected in the international policy agendas. Using United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) General Debate speeches from 1994 to 2023, we examine how gender shapes three dimensions of environmental policy communication:
(1) the priority of issues, (2) the vocabulary used, and (3) the rhetorical framing of environmental issues. Using text-as-data methods, we find little evidence that female leaders devote more of their platform to environmental issues than male leaders. How-
ever, female leaders employ a distinct set of environmental vocabulary and are more likely to frame these discussions through a security lens, linking environmental challenges to broader security concerns. These findings suggest that female leaders have strategically adapted to a communication challenge.