Autocratic Genderwashing: Women’s Rights as Authoritarian Strategies
The purpose of this book project is to examine why autocracies adopt gender equality reforms. Historically, autocracies have had a bad track record with respect to the adoption of women’s rights reforms. Yet, in the past 30 years a majority of gender equality reforms have been adopted by non-democratic states. In the book, we make the argument that modern autocrats adopt gender-equality reforms with ulterior motives: to boost regime legitimacy while shifting attention away from violations of electoral integrity and human rights. We refer to this phenomenon as “autocratic genderwashing”. By taking credit for advances in gender equality, autocratic governments put the spotlight on an area that is widely seen as intimately connected with democracy, while drawing the focus away from persistent authoritarian practices.
To exercise autocratic genderwashing, autocrats devise legitimation strategies aimed at specific groups: the political opposition, international actors, and civil society and citizens. We use a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze how and where these strategies take place and whether they are successful. We conclude by discussing how to expose autocratic genderwashing and prevent that gender-equality reforms are being used to strengthen authoritarian rule.
The project will benefit immensely from a research visit to Yale University, where I will consolidate and develop established contacts and present and discuss a full draft of the book.
To exercise autocratic genderwashing, autocrats devise legitimation strategies aimed at specific groups: the political opposition, international actors, and civil society and citizens. We use a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze how and where these strategies take place and whether they are successful. We conclude by discussing how to expose autocratic genderwashing and prevent that gender-equality reforms are being used to strengthen authoritarian rule.
The project will benefit immensely from a research visit to Yale University, where I will consolidate and develop established contacts and present and discuss a full draft of the book.
Final report
The main purpose of this project has been to address the puzzling question as to why autocracies adopt gender equality reforms. Autocracies have historically had a bad track record with respect to the adoption of women’s rights policies: liberal values such as gender equality are usually not prioritized by illiberal governments. However, in the post-Cold war period from the 1990s onwards, there has been a turn towards increased awareness about the persistent social, economic, and political gender inequalities that permeate virtually all countries in the world. This has resulted in a push for gender equality that has been global; however, often these gender equality reforms have been adopted by unlikely gender equality champions: autocratic governments (Donno, Fox, and Kaasik 2021; Zetterberg et al. 2022).
The project has addressed the question by making the argument that autocracies adopt gender equality reforms mainly for strategic reasons – as a legitimation strategy – that ultimately aim at enhancing the prospects for regime survival. More specifically, it argues that autocrats seek to project an image to segments of the population and to international audiences of being progressive, liberal, and even democratic - while deflecting attention from persistent authoritarian practices. In the project, we refer to this strategy as autocratic genderwashing. By engaging in this strategy, autocratic governments seek to enhance both their internal and external legitimacy.
A key finding from the project is that the strategy largely works. This is most visible on international audiences such as democracy and development practitioners, and citizens more broadly, who update their beliefs about an autocratic regime when they are informed about its commitments in the area of gender equality. These audiences perceive the country as being more democratic and more worthy of financial support when it adopts women’s rights policies. We see a similar pattern also among domestic audiences, but only among women and only in some autocracies.
I present the argument and the empirical analyses together with Elin Bjarnegård in a book manuscript that is under contract with the prestigious publisher Princeton University Press. I have used the RJ funding to write chapters for the book as well as to finalize the manuscript (text editing, etc.). In addition, I have disseminated the findings of the project, and received comments on the manuscript, through various talks that I have given during research stays abroad. These include talks at the University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers University, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison (all in the United States). We now have a full manuscript that we will submit to the publisher at the end of this month (i.e. June 2025). The plan is then to publish the book, which has the preliminary title Autocratic Genderwashing: Women’s Rights as Authoritarian Strategies, in 2026.
The book is a so-called “crossover book” that is not only targeting scholars and students but also people outside of academia, such as people working with democracy support, human rights, and gender equality. For this reason, we will start promoting the book already when the manuscript is with the publisher in the final stages of production. This will be done by writing short pieces, aimed for international newspapers and magazines, that summarize the argument of the book. After the book has been published, we will do a book launch together with an organization that is working practically with the support of democratic development (e.g. International IDEA or the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where we have established contacts).
The book summarizes research that I have conducted during the past ten years. During this time period, the world has changed in many ways. For instance, there has been a recent trend of what scholars have referred to as “gender backlash” that has received a lot of media attention. Some of the political leaders that personify this trend are Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who all have made sexist remarks and attacked feminism both rhetorically and in policy-making. Previous research on gender backlash has often assumed that this trend is “supply-driven” by ideologically convinced sexist leaders. However, when we look beyond the high-profile cases of Orbán, Erdogan, and Bolsonaro, there are more nuances to this picture. We have identified, for instance, that some of the “genderwashers” in our data also engage in gender backlash – and vice versa. Even “macho” political leaders like Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have approached gender in contrasting ways, sometimes portraying themselves as strong supporters of women’s rights and other times cracking down on (some of) these rights.
While the book touches on the multiple approaches to gender among authoritarian leaders, there are some key questions that we are not able to address. For instance, when do authoritarian leaders engage in what Bjarnegård and I refer to as genderbashing, i.e. in activities that oppose women’s rights? And when do they support these rights? Moreover, are there differences in approach to gender depending on policy area? The literature suggests that genderbashing often takes place in areas related to women’s bodily or reproductive rights. To address this question, I submitted in March last year a grant application – Gender as Tactic in Autocratic Politics – to the Swedish Research Council (VR). The application was successful and I was granted 6,659,000 SEK for a four-year project that starts immediately after the RJ Sabbatical. Bjarnegård and I further developed the ideas from the grant application and wrote a paper that argues that autocratic genderwashing and genderbashing are two different approaches to gender that strategically-minded authoritarian leaders use to instrumentalize gender. Rather than seeing gender backlash as mainly supply-driven, we argue that authoritarian leaders often have a flexible position on women’s rights and that they tailor different messages to appease different segments of the population as well as different international audiences. The paper has been accepted for publication in a leading journal on the study of democracy and autocracy: Journal of Democracy (to appear in the October 2025 issue). We have published in the journal before and then we have paid a fee in order to have the paper published as open access. We will use the same strategy this time.
The project has addressed the question by making the argument that autocracies adopt gender equality reforms mainly for strategic reasons – as a legitimation strategy – that ultimately aim at enhancing the prospects for regime survival. More specifically, it argues that autocrats seek to project an image to segments of the population and to international audiences of being progressive, liberal, and even democratic - while deflecting attention from persistent authoritarian practices. In the project, we refer to this strategy as autocratic genderwashing. By engaging in this strategy, autocratic governments seek to enhance both their internal and external legitimacy.
A key finding from the project is that the strategy largely works. This is most visible on international audiences such as democracy and development practitioners, and citizens more broadly, who update their beliefs about an autocratic regime when they are informed about its commitments in the area of gender equality. These audiences perceive the country as being more democratic and more worthy of financial support when it adopts women’s rights policies. We see a similar pattern also among domestic audiences, but only among women and only in some autocracies.
I present the argument and the empirical analyses together with Elin Bjarnegård in a book manuscript that is under contract with the prestigious publisher Princeton University Press. I have used the RJ funding to write chapters for the book as well as to finalize the manuscript (text editing, etc.). In addition, I have disseminated the findings of the project, and received comments on the manuscript, through various talks that I have given during research stays abroad. These include talks at the University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers University, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison (all in the United States). We now have a full manuscript that we will submit to the publisher at the end of this month (i.e. June 2025). The plan is then to publish the book, which has the preliminary title Autocratic Genderwashing: Women’s Rights as Authoritarian Strategies, in 2026.
The book is a so-called “crossover book” that is not only targeting scholars and students but also people outside of academia, such as people working with democracy support, human rights, and gender equality. For this reason, we will start promoting the book already when the manuscript is with the publisher in the final stages of production. This will be done by writing short pieces, aimed for international newspapers and magazines, that summarize the argument of the book. After the book has been published, we will do a book launch together with an organization that is working practically with the support of democratic development (e.g. International IDEA or the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where we have established contacts).
The book summarizes research that I have conducted during the past ten years. During this time period, the world has changed in many ways. For instance, there has been a recent trend of what scholars have referred to as “gender backlash” that has received a lot of media attention. Some of the political leaders that personify this trend are Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who all have made sexist remarks and attacked feminism both rhetorically and in policy-making. Previous research on gender backlash has often assumed that this trend is “supply-driven” by ideologically convinced sexist leaders. However, when we look beyond the high-profile cases of Orbán, Erdogan, and Bolsonaro, there are more nuances to this picture. We have identified, for instance, that some of the “genderwashers” in our data also engage in gender backlash – and vice versa. Even “macho” political leaders like Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have approached gender in contrasting ways, sometimes portraying themselves as strong supporters of women’s rights and other times cracking down on (some of) these rights.
While the book touches on the multiple approaches to gender among authoritarian leaders, there are some key questions that we are not able to address. For instance, when do authoritarian leaders engage in what Bjarnegård and I refer to as genderbashing, i.e. in activities that oppose women’s rights? And when do they support these rights? Moreover, are there differences in approach to gender depending on policy area? The literature suggests that genderbashing often takes place in areas related to women’s bodily or reproductive rights. To address this question, I submitted in March last year a grant application – Gender as Tactic in Autocratic Politics – to the Swedish Research Council (VR). The application was successful and I was granted 6,659,000 SEK for a four-year project that starts immediately after the RJ Sabbatical. Bjarnegård and I further developed the ideas from the grant application and wrote a paper that argues that autocratic genderwashing and genderbashing are two different approaches to gender that strategically-minded authoritarian leaders use to instrumentalize gender. Rather than seeing gender backlash as mainly supply-driven, we argue that authoritarian leaders often have a flexible position on women’s rights and that they tailor different messages to appease different segments of the population as well as different international audiences. The paper has been accepted for publication in a leading journal on the study of democracy and autocracy: Journal of Democracy (to appear in the October 2025 issue). We have published in the journal before and then we have paid a fee in order to have the paper published as open access. We will use the same strategy this time.