Female Rulers Are MORE Likely Than Men to Go to War — the Study That Broke the Stereotype

Female rulers are MORE likely than men to go to war, reveals study of leaders spanning centuries

• Queens have been 39 percentage points more likely to declare war than kings
• US researchers went out to test whether there was more peace under females
• Showed when a state was ruled by a female it was more likely to go to war

(By Colin Fernandez, Daily Mail, Nov 2019 — the image is Queen Elizabeth I, the woman who sent the Armada to its doom, dressed like she’s wearing the national GDP.)

The study was real: Dube and Harish’s 2019 paper ‘Queens’ analyzed 193 European rulers over five centuries and found queen-regnants were 39 percentage points more likely to enter war than kings. The authors’ hypothesis was that queens had to prove themselves — female rulers were seen as weak, so they had to be MORE aggressive to secure their thrones and deter challengers. Peace was a luxury they couldn’t afford.

The Elizabeth I placement is the meme’s perfect punchline, because she is the counterexample that proves the rule: the Virgin Queen fought wars, ordered executions, ran a spy network, and is remembered as the most successful English monarch of the age — because she had to be.

Appreciation:
– Elizabeth I was called ‘the weak, feeble woman’ by the Pope and spent her entire reign proving him wrong. She took England from broke and torn by religious war to a global power. The Dube-Harish finding is her biography in one stat.
– The study’s logic: queen-regnants were MORE likely to be attacked (they were seen as soft targets), so they responded with preemptive war. Female rulers didn’t cause wars because they were bloodthirsty — they caused wars because the world kept testing them, and they learned to test back first.
– The ’39 percentage points’ number is doing heavy lifting: over 5 centuries of European history, a queen regnant went to war at almost double the rate of a king. The medieval world’s worst nightmare — a woman on the throne — was actually the most dangerous thing in Europe.
– Catherine the Great expanded Russia by 500,000 square miles. Isabella of Castile bankrolled Columbus AND launched the Reconquista’s final blow. Elizabeth I took on the Armada. Queen Victoria’s wars spanned five continents. The pattern holds: give a woman a crown and she will use it.
– The funny bit: the Daily Mail headline frames this as a revelation, but every male monarch in history could have told you — the scariest people to go to war against are the ones who had to fight their way to the throne, and in a world of kings-by-birth, that was usually a woman.
– And the meme-level irony: the portrait of Elizabeth, with her pearls and ruff and pale skin, looks like the most peaceful image imaginable. The Armada Portrait of 1588 shows her hand resting on a globe — the message being ‘I own this.’ The woman in the painting is literally the ’39 percentage points’ made flesh.

War isn’t a man’s business. It’s a throne’s business — and history’s most aggressive thrones often had queens on them, because they knew exactly what the alternative was.