Kendall Kutzavitch is the recipient of the 2025 “Mike Gilotti” Award for the best undergraduate thesis in a political science program. Her thesis, “Women in Government: A Comparative Analysis of Female Representation and Militarization Spending Across Countries” investigates the impact of gender equality on countries’ national defense policies. She builds on theoretical frameworks of gender differences to argue that women’s gender roles incline them to favor peaceful solutions in international conflict over military solutions. She thus hypothesizes, as the proportion of women in a country’s legislature increases, military spending as a percentage of GDP will decrease. To test her hypothesis, she compiled data on military spending in 150 countries over a 25 year period from a wide range of both public sources, including the World Bank, UN Human Development reports, and the Interparliamentary Union, and political science sources, such as the Correlates of War dataset (partially developed at Penn State) and the Varieties of Democracy data set. She finds that both greater female representation in national legislatures and higher levels of gender equality in a society more broadly are correlated to reduced military spending.
Congratulations Kendall!
