Who Speaks, Who Leads: Decomposing Gender Effects in Foreign Policy Rhetoric at the UNGA

Does the gender of state leaders shape foreign policy rhetoric? We examine UN General Assembly General Debate speeches (1970-2025) through Latent Semantic Scaling to decompose the gender of the chief executive from that of the speaker at the podium, a distinction votes do not allow. The results imply that gender plays different roles at different levels. In recent decades, among democracies, women who deliver speeches are less hawkish than men, but countries led by women deliver more hawkish speeches. A woman leader's hawkishness is thus masked when she speaks for herself, surfacing only when a male delegate speaks in her place. Neither pattern appears in autocracies. These findings reconcile conflicting claims about women’s peacefulness versus hawkishness in foreign policy.