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ABSTRACT
This study explores how the duration of missions affects the participation of women in United Nations (UN) peace operations. I argue that women are less likely to be deployed in the early stages of missions because new missions are associated with high levels of operational uncertainty, which is ultimately a type of risk. Instead, women’s participation will increase over time as the uncertainty decreases and the operating environment becomes more predictable. In an extended analysis, I also explore if the level of gender equality in a troop contributing country affects the decision to deploy women to the early phases of missions. Applying a large-N approach, I study the proportion of women in military contributions to UN peace operations between 2009 and 2015. Using a set of multilevel mixed-effects generalized linear models, the main argument find empirical support. However, when the robustness of the findings is challenged, there is indication that there could be additional factors that affect operational uncertainty and the perceived risk associated with an operating environment. The result of the extended analysis indicate that more gender equal countries are more prone to deploy larger proportions of female military personnel, regardless of when the deployment takes place.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Sabrina Karim and Kyle Beardsley for kindly sharing the replication data from ‘Ladies Last: Peacekeeping and Gendered Protection’. I also wish to thank Timo Smit and Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) for sharing data and ideas. Finally, I am forever thankful for all the time and effort Lisa Hultman has put into this project and for letting me be part of the Ending Atrocities research project.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data Availability Statement
Replication files and online appendix are available at: https://www.pcr.uu.se/data/replication-data/
About the Author
Kajsa Tidblad-Lundholm works as a research assistant at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University. She works at the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) and with the research project ‘Ending Atrocities: Third Party Interventions into Civil Wars’ directed by Associate Professor Lisa Hultman.
Notes
1 This article builds on the author’s master’s thesis, see Tidblad-Lundholm, “Women’s Participation in UN Peacekeeping.”
2 See for example UNSC, resolution 1325; UNSC, resolution 1820; UNSC, resolution 2242; Mungcal, “UN Campaign to Increase Women Military Peacekeepers Off Track.”
3 See for example Egnell, Hojem, and Berts, Gender, Military Effectiveness, and Organizational Change; Ghittoni, Lehouck and Watson, “Elsie Initiative for Women in Peace Operations Baseline study”; Karim and Beardsley, Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping; Kenny, “Using Financial Incentives to Increase the Number of Women in UN Peacekeeping”; UNPK, “Women in peacekeeping”; Valenius, “A Few Kind Women.”
4 UNPK, Summary of Troop Contributions to UN Peacekeeping Operations.
5 See for example Beardsley, “The Known Knowns and Known Unknowns of Peacekeeping Data”; Berg and Bjarnegård, “Dissecting gender imbalance”; Crawford, Lebovic, and Macdonald, “Explaining the Variation in Gender Composition of Personnel Contributions to UN Peacekeeping Operations”; Karim and Beardsley, “Female Peacekeepers and Gender Balancing”; “Ladies Last”; Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping; Kreft, “The Gender Mainstreaming Gap”; Olsson and Möller, “Data on Women's Participation in UN, EU, and OSCE Field Missions.”
6 See for example Berg and Bjarnegård, “Dissecting Gender Imbalance”; Crawford, Lebovic, and Macdonald, “Explaining the Variation in Gender Composition of Personnel Contributions to UN Peacekeeping Operations”; Karim and Beardsley, Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping.
7 Karim and Beardsley, “Female Peacekeepers and Gender Balancing”; Kreft, “The Gender Mainstreaming Gap.”
8 Karim and Beardsley, Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping; Crawford, Lebovic, and Macdonald, “Explaining the Variation in Gender Composition of Personnel Contributions to UN Peacekeeping Operations.”
9 Smit and Tidblad-Lundholm, “Trends in Women's Participation in UN, EU and OSCE Peace Operations.”
10 Karim and Beardsley, “Ladies Last”; Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping.
11 UNSC, “Deployment of Female Personnel Boosts Effectiveness.”
12 DPKO, Mainstreaming a Gender Perspective In Multidimensional Peace Operations, 4.
13 See for example Berg and Bjarnegård, “Dissecting Gender Imbalance”; Crawford, Lebovic, and Macdonald, “Explaining the Variation in Gender Composition of Personnel Contributions to UN Peacekeeping Operations”; Karim and Beardsley, Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping.
14 Karim and Beardsley, “Female Peacekeepers and Gender Balancing”; Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping.
15 Berg and Bjarnegård, “Dissecting Gender Imbalance.”
16 Karim and Beardsley, Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping.
17 Ibid.
18 Crawford, Lebovic, and Macdonald, “Explaining the Variation in Gender Composition of Personnel Contributions to UN Peacekeeping Operations.”
19 Karim and Beardsley, “Ladies Last”; Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping.
20 Carreiras, “Gender and Civil-Military Relations in Advanced Democracies,” 171.
21 Crawford, Lebovic, and Macdonald, “Explaining the Variation in Gender Composition of Personnel Contributions to UN Peacekeeping Operations”; Karim and Beardsley, “Ladies Last”; Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping; Schjølset, “NATO and the Women.”
22 Crawford, Lebovic, and Macdonald, “Explaining the Variation in Gender Composition of Personnel Contributions to UN Peacekeeping Operations,” 265.
23 Karim and Beardsley, “Ladies Last”; Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping.
24 Karim and Beardsley, Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping, 70–2.
25 Ibid.
26 Whitworth, Men, Militarism, and UN Peacekeeping; Kronsell, “Sexed Bodies and Military Masculinities.”
27 See for example Berg and Bjarnegård, “Dissecting Gender Imbalance”; Duncanson, “Forces for Good?”; Higate, “‘Soft Clerks’ and ‘Hard Civvies’”; Karim and Beardsley, “Ladies Last”; King, “The Female Combat Soldier”; Whitworth, Men, Militarism, and UN Peacekeeping.
28 Karim and Beardsley, “Female Peacekeepers and Gender Balancing.”
29 Berg and Bjarnegård, “Dissecting Gender Imbalance,” 3.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid, 5.
32 Carpenter, “Women, Children and Other Vulnerable Groups”; Karim and Beardsley, “Ladies Last”; Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping.
33 Karim and Beardsley, Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping, 76–8.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid, 28.
36 Ibid, 37.
37 Karim and Beardsley, Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping, 76–8; Harris and Miller, “Gender and Perceptions of Danger.”
38 See for example Byrnes, Miller, and Schafer, “Gender Differences in Risk Taking”; McDermott and Cowden, “The Effects of Uncertainty and Sex in a Crisis Simulation Game.”
39 Karim and Beardsley, Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping, 76–8.
40 Karim and Beardsley, “Female Peacekeepers and Gender Balancing,” 483.
41 Bove and Elia. “Supplying Peace”; Karim and Beardsley, “Female Peacekeepers and Gender Balancing.”
42 Karim and Beardsley, “Female Peacekeepers and Gender Balancing,” 469.
43 Ibid.
44 Sjolander and Trevenen, “One of the Boys?”
45 Karim and Beardsley, “Female Peacekeepers and Gender Balancing,” 469.
46 Young, “The Logic of Masculinist Protection,” 4.
47 UNSC, Report of the Secretary-General (S/2008/98).
48 UNSC, Report of the Secretary-General (S/2013/607).
49 UNPK, “Women in Peacekeeping.”
50 UNSC, “Deployment of Female Personnel Boosts Effectiveness”; Karim, “Reevaluating Peacekeeping Effectiveness.”
51 For a full list of included troop contributing countries, see online appendix, Section A.
52 For a full list of included missions, see online appendix, Section B.
53 Brunei and Palau are not included in this study due to systematic lack of data in the control variables.
54 The UN categorizes military personnel as ‘military troops’ and ‘military experts’, both categories are included as ‘military personnel’ in this study. The category ‘military experts’ includes military observers, investigators, advisors and more, see DPKO, Roles and Training Standards for UN Military Experts.
55 For more information about the dependent variable, see online appendix, Section C.
56 International Peace Institute (IPI) Peacekeeping Database, “Gender data.”
57 There are 2431 observations in the first bar (0-1%), 2272 of these observations contain 0 percent female personnel.
58 It is important to stress that all missions do not deploy military personnel on the start date of the mission. A mission could for instance have received a civilian component before the military component of a mission was deployed. Therefore, the independent variable is based on the year that marks first deployment of military personnel.
59 A weakness of this operationalization is that it does not consider the actual duration of a mission. As missions start on different dates during a year, some of them can theoretically have been ongoing for a just a month and be coded as new whereas others can have been operating for nearly a year and still be coded as new. For comparability, it would have been preferable to code new mission based on the actual duration of the mission rather than based on calendar years. Luckily, none of the missions included as new in this study were deployed in the first few or last few months of the year. Hence, there is relatively little actual duration variation between the missions coded as new mission. The ideal data structure would be TCC-mission-rotation, but until date there is no such global data. One could consider using a monthly data structure to capture the actual duration of new missions. However, as very few of the control variables included in this study are reported per month, it would be very difficult to study the monthly variation in the dependent variable.
60 Hultman, Kathman and Shannon, “United Nations Peacekeeping Dynamics and the Duration of Post-Civil Conflict Peace”; International Peace Institute (IPI) Peacekeeping Database, “Gender Data.”
61 Sundberg and Melander, “Introducing the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset.” Syria is not included in the UCDP GED 18.1. The number of battle related deaths for Syria has therefore been provided by the UCDP, “Syria Country Profile.” For missions taking place in more than one country, the number of deaths have been re-coded for the dyads or the territories which these missions are mandated to engage in, see online appendix, Section C.
62 Henke, “United Nations Peacekeeping Fatalities Dataset.”
63 UN Statistics Division, “Per capita GDP.”
64 Cohen and Nordås, “Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict.”
65 For missions taking place in more than one country, the log GDP per capita and the prevalence of SVAC has been approximated, see online appendix, Section C.
66 UNDPA, “Field Missions Mandate Table”; Van Der Lijn and Smit, “Peacekeepers Under Threat?”
67 World Bank, “Labor Force, Female”; World Bank, “GDP Per Capita.” For information on missing values and interpolation, see online appendix, Section C.
68 Grace-Martin, “Five Extensions of the General Linear Model”; Torres- Reyna, “Panel Data Analysis Fixed and Random Effects.”
69 Karim and Beardsley, “Ladies Last”; Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping.
70 I have also controlled for one-sided violence deaths in the operation environment, if the TCC is a Western state, how many military personnel the TCC has deployed to all ongoing UN missions in a given year, the size of the TCC’s population. Including these variables in the logit-transformed mixed effects regressions do not substantially change the estimates of interest.
71 A difference between two parameters can be significant even if the confidence intervals for the individual parameters overlap.
72 For comparison, the raw descriptive mean of percentage share of women in a country’s troop contribution to a new mission is 2.20% (Std. Dev. 7.56%, n = 203) while the mean percentage share of women in a contribution to a mission that has been ongoing for more than one calendar year is 4.28% (Std. Dev. 12.20%, n = 3272).
73 In the online appendix (Section D), I run this model without the logit transformation in an attempt to interpret the size of the effect of duration. Again, this estimate should be interpreted with caution, but it suggests that women’s participation increase, on average, 0.3 pp per year. The coefficient is significant at 99% confidence level whilst keeping the control variables constant. The effect is diminishing over time.
74 In contrast to some previous studies, this study does not find a negative effect of fatalities amongst peacekeepers on women’s participation. Rather, this empirical study suggests that there is a positive relationship between fatalities amongst peacekeepers and women’s participation in peacekeeping. This empirical finding needs to be put in context. In an attempt to construct a difficult test for this study’s main argument, the control variable has been operationalized to include peacekeeper fatalities due to combat as well as other causes of death, such as fatalities due to diseases and accidents. The suggested positive effect of fatalities amongst peacekeepers on women’s participation is prominently driven by MINUSTAH (Haiti), where extraordinarily many peacekeepers died without it noticeably affecting the relatively high share of women in contributions. Looking into the data, it becomes evident that these fatalities were caused by the earthquake that hit Haiti in 2010. When MINUSTAH (Haiti) is excluded from the analysis, the positive correlation between fatalities amongst peacekeepers and the share of female military personnel disappears. The exclusion of MINUSTAH does however not affect the statistical relation between this study’s main variables.
75 Smit and Tidblad-Lundholm, “Trends in Women's Participation in UN, EU and OSCE Peace Operations.”
76 In the online appendix (Section E), I explore if there are systematic differences in where more and less gender equal TCCs deploy peacekeepers. The descriptive statistics do not indicate any large systematic bias.
77 A similar scatterplot including all contributions, regardless of when the contribution took place, is included in the online appendix, Section D.
78 Karim and Beardsley coded the variable based on information from multiple sources including: ‘the NATO Committee on Gender Perspectives’ national reports (2004–2012); a DCAF report entitled “Security Sector and Gender in West Africa”; The Military Balance; a US Africa Command study of women in African militaries; the 2012 UK armed forces annual personnel report; the US Department of Defense’s active duty military personnel statistics; and reported numbers from government websites.’ Karim and Beardsley, “Ladies Last,” 73. The approximated percentage share of women in TCCs’ domestic forces do not vary during the time period studied. Karim and Beardsley have coded the variable for the time period 2009–2013, I have used the same values 2014–2015. For a list of included TCCs and the approximated ratio of women in domestic forces, see online appendix, Section C.
79 Van Der Lijn and Smit, “Peacekeepers Under Threat?”, 1; Henke, “Has UN Peacekeeping Become More Deadly?,” 10.
80 Swedish Armed Forces, “Mali-MINUSMA.”