Women Leaders and Peacekeeping Contributions: Bypassing the Political Double Bind? What impact does women’s executive leadership have on state involvement in UN peacekeeping missions? Past literature has focused on state-based explanations that exclude individual leadership from the equation and overly rely on security explanations for committing troops. In particular, this research posits that leaders use peacekeeping missions to reduce the risk of coups within a country. However, this research fails to take into account the individual calculus of chief executives. I posit that due to factors such as the political double bind, gendered leadership may matter in this decision calculus. Specifically, I argue that women leaders may be more likely to commit to UN peacekeeping missions because they can use the commitment of troops to prove their ability to both navigate fulfilling feminine stereotypes, but doing so through a potentially masculine policy arena. I test this argument on a global sample of countries from 1990 to 2018 and find that women leaders do commit more troops and police to peacekeeping missions, but not more observers.