Does war deepen gender inequalities in politicians’ behavior or help erase them? We draw from the terror management theory developed in psychology to argue that the onset of a violent conflict is likely to push politicians to conform more strongly with traditional gender stereotypes because it helps individuals cope with existential fears. To test our argument, we use data on Ukrainian politicians’ engagement on social media (136,455 Facebook posts by 469 politicians) in the three months before and after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, and interrupted time series analysis, to assess the effect of conflict on politicians’ behavior. We find that conflict onset deepens gender-stereotypical behavior among politicians in their public engagement. We also show that, consistent with our argument, gender biases among the public are magnified during war.

战争是否会加深政客行为中的性别不平等，还是有助于消除这些不平等？我们借鉴心理学中发展起来的恐怖管理理论，认为暴力冲突的爆发可能会促使政治家更加强烈地遵守传统的性别刻板印象，因为它有助于个人应对存在的恐惧。为了检验我们的论点，我们使用 2022 年俄罗斯入侵乌克兰前后三个月乌克兰政客在社交媒体上的参与度数据（469 名政客发布了 136,455 条 Facebook 帖子），并进行了中断时间序列分析，以评估冲突的影响关于政客的行为。我们发现，冲突的爆发加深了政治家在公共参与中的性别刻板行为。我们还表明，与我们的论点一致，公众中的性别偏见在战争期间被放大。