Women Leaders in the Baltic States: Untying the Double-Bind

What role do security organizations like NATO play in the path to power for women leaders? How do these organizations affect the relationship between women executives and security crisis? What we know about women’s paths to power is typically situated within the political double bind. The double bind literature asserts that women leaders must overcome masculine expectations of them while in office by proving themselves capable in the realm of security, while also still fulfilling feminine stereotypes. I posit that due to the integral nature of NATO in building security infrastructure in the Baltic States, NATO’s Article V has provided a security guarantee for the Baltic states, which has resulted in a consensus around security policy. This removes security as a major issue in elections, lessening the effects of role incongruity and reducing the burden of proving security competence from women leaders. This argument is an important contribution to the double bind literature that has yet to examine the relationship between institutional influence, regional context, and gendered expectations of women leaders. Women leaders’ perception and decision-making is also regionally pertinent, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has increased the presence of security crisis in Central and Eastern Europe. In the case of the Baltics, I find that the influence of NATO on Baltic security has fundamentally altered the role of the executive in perceptions of security competence, and has altered the effects of the political double-bind on women leaders in kind. I utilize process-tracing to demonstrate this theory through a case study of Lithuania.