Quantitative Study Of Gender Equality And International Armed Conflict

This thesis is built on the previous work of Caprioli’s article’Gender Conflict’. A new Model, on the basis of optimization of her previous work with new control variables added and newest data updated, is set up to verify the truthfulness of feminist claim. According to feminist theory, gender equality reflects the way society deals with political dispute and the attitude towards the means of political solution. Society with higher level of gender equality tends to make compromise and to utilize non-violent means in political dispute, which extends in realm of international politics to less possibility of using military force in international conflict given other factors being equal. Thus, promoting gender equality worldwide will help to make a more peaceful world. Three indicators, including fertility rate, percentage of women in parliament and percentage of women in labor force, are used to measure the independent variable—level of gender equality while hostility level measuring state’s tendency to use force and several conflict-related factors serve as the dependent variable and control variables respectively. The result of data analysis confirms the feminist hypothesis on international conflict with two of the three indictors showing statistic significance.