An examination of trade liberalization as a gendered foreign policy instrument

Research on women and trade policy presents mixed findings: Public opinion studies consistently found women more protectionist than men; yet, legislative research found women sometimes support higher tariffs and sometimes support liberalization. We argue these inconsistencies reflect how trade is framed. When trade is presented as a foreign policy and development tool benefiting women in developing countries, women are more likely to support liberalization. Women’s support for trade depends on perceptions of who benefits, and is conditioned by individual risk tolerance. We test this argument using two empirical strategies. First, we use a survey experiment with US respondents to demonstrate that women increase their support for trade when it is framed as benefiting women in developing countries. This positive association is stronger among risk-tolerant female respondents. Second, we examine the policy implications of the argument and our individual-level findings. Using tariff data from Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries and instrumental-variable approaches to address endogeneity, we find that more women in legislatures in developed countries is associated with lower tariffs. These results help reconcile contradictory results in the literature and underscore the importance of recognizing trade as a multidimensional domestic and foreign policy tool.