That ensures their links AND alt reify gendered norms.

Summary This wide array of positivist gender/IR work offers three major sets of contributions and challenges to existing IR scholarship. First, this scholarship has provided positivist evidence shedding light on many of the theoretical and descriptive suppositions developed in nonpositivist gender/IR work. Furthermore, the positivist evidence has argued for the substantive as well as statistical significance of gender in explaining critically important phenomena. As noted, Hudson et al. (2012) propose that gender has a larger impact on conflict onset than economic development or democracy. Erik Melander (2005a) found that measures of gender equity have at least as much impact on civil war onset as factors such as economic development, democracy, and ethnic fractionalization. Gizelis (2009) found that improved gender equity, as measured by higher female life expectancy, increases the likelihood of the success of UN peacekeeping missions several fold. Some of the positivist work critiques the simple view that women are always more peaceful than men are, supporting the general feminist perspective that the effects of gender on behavior are sophisticated, especially because gender is cultural/social as well as biological. For example, the role of women in terrorist and insurgent groups varies widely, as women are sometimes combatants, even engaging in sexual assault. The effects of gender on public opinion are also complex. Contra some 1980s perspectives about the hypermasculinity of nuclear weapons, for example, there is some evidence that American women are not significantly less likely than American men to favor nuclear weapons use. Second, this positivist work has helped address some scholarly questions that nonpositivist scholars had identified as important and underexplored. At a very simple level, positivist data collection has helped shed more light on the monumental scope of gender-related violence, a set of behaviors that significantly negatively affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people who happen to be women (Hudson et al. 2012). Positivist work has helped describe and understand the effects of elements of the global economy on the lives of women. It has also helped improve our understanding of the role women play in the foreign policy process, especially female heads of state, cabinet members, and members of parliament. Third, positivist work has helped identify new questions related to gender and IR. Positivist work has explored the role gender plays in the formation of trade policy preferences, the different political roles of female as compared with male casualties, the international determinants of the spread of gender equity, and others. New Directions Positivist scholarship has not yet come close to answering all existing questions relating to gender and IR. Much work remains to be done. Perhaps the single most important priority is for scholars to be aware of making essentialist assumptions that the meaning and behavioral consequences of gender are constant across space and time. Some of the positivist gender/IR work assumes that gender has essentialist effects, using research designs that do not allow for the possibility of varying effects of gender across context. Future positivist gender/IR work would benefit from relaxing essentialist assumptions, developing ideas as to how the effects of gender might vary across contexts. For example, a female national leader emerging from a society with weaker gender equity norms might behave differently than a female national leader emerging from a society with stronger gender equity norms. Research already suggests that the consequences of gender vary drastically across insurgent and terrorist groups, a phenomenon that deserves greater attention.