Women’s participation in UN peacekeeping: How does the duration of missions affect the participation of women in UN peace operations?

Abstract: In this thesis, I explore 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 uncertainty which is ultimately a type of risk. Instead, women’s participation will increase as the uncertainty decreases and the operating environment becomes more predictable. I also test if more gender equal force contributing countries are less prone to deploy women to new missions due to a stronger gendered protection norm constraining deployment of women to risky environments. Applying a large-N approach, this thesis studies 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 initially find empirical support. But, when the main findings are challenged through robustness tests, the results become somewhat ambiguous and it is not sound to exclude the possibility that unobserved factors drive the empirical results. This thesis does not find more gender equal countries to be less prone to deploy women to the early stages of missions. Rather, countries which see higher levels of gender equality seem more prone to deploy larger proportions of women, regardless of when the deployment takes place.