Dictatorship and Gender Dynamics

Sunday 25 January 2026

The proposition that dictators are almost always men is not merely an artefact of selective memory. It reflects deep structural features of political power, warfare and social organisation that have, for most of recorded history, favoured male domination of the state. From the twentieth century’s mass-mobilising tyrannies to earlier absolutist regimes, the overwhelming preponderance of men at the apex of coercive authority is striking, and demands explanation rather than casual acceptance.

Modern dictatorships have tended to emerge from institutions that were themselves profoundly masculinised. The twentieth century’s canonical autocrats, such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Saddam Hussein, Augusto Pinochet and Francisco Franco all rose through military structures, revolutionary movements or party hierarchies that were overwhelmingly male. Control of organised violence, whether through armies, militias or secret police, has been the decisive prerequisite for dictatorship. These instruments were historically closed to women, not merely by custom but by law and social expectation. Where the route to power runs through barracks, trenches and paramilitary cells, women have been systematically excluded at the point of entry.

There is also a cultural dimension. Dictatorships are commonly legitimated through narratives of strength, sacrifice and national resurrection, tropes traditionally coded as masculine. The dictator presents himself as father, warrior or saviour of the nation, metaphors that sit easily within societies that associate political authority with male dominance in both public and private life. Even where women have participated in revolutionary movements, the final consolidation of power has tended to reward those who conform most closely to these masculinised ideals. In such contexts, the absence of women at the summit is not accidental but structural.

Psychology and political sociology reinforce this pattern. Highly personalist regimes favour aggressive competition, the suppression of rivals and the cultivation of fear. These behaviours are not biologically male, but they are socially encouraged in men far more than in women, particularly in patriarchal societies. Where political survival depends upon the ruthless elimination of opponents, the socialisation of men into competitive dominance confers a grim advantage.

Yet history does supply counter-examples, and they are instructive precisely because they illuminate the exceptions that prove the rule.

In the ancient world, Cleopatra VII exercised autocratic power in a dynastic system where sovereignty was inherited rather than seized. Her authority derived not from mass politics or military command in the modern sense but from royal blood, religious legitimacy and control of court politics. Cleopatra’s Egypt was patriarchal, but it also accepted female rule within a narrow dynastic frame. She ruled not because the system was egalitarian, but because it was sufficiently rigid to allow a woman to inherit supreme power when the lineage demanded it.

A similar pattern appears with Catherine the Great. Her reign was undeniably autocratic, yet her path to power ran through palace intrigue rather than popular mobilisation. Catherine succeeded by mastering the rules of a male-dominated aristocratic court, aligning herself with the military elite and presenting herself as the embodiment of Russian imperial destiny. She ruled in a system that tolerated female sovereignty at the top, so long as it did not challenge male dominance beneath it. Her success required not the dismantling of patriarchy, but her exceptional ability to operate within it.

In the modern era examples are rarer and more contested. Indira Gandhi exercised authoritarian power during India’s Emergency period, suspending civil liberties and ruling by decree. Yet even here her authority rested upon dynastic legitimacy and party inheritance rather than a direct challenge to male control of the coercive apparatus. She was accepted as an exception within a male political culture, not as evidence of its transformation.

Perhaps the starkest illustration of the relationship between gender and dictatorship is Ranavalona I (sovereign of Madagascar from 1828 to 1861), whose nineteenth-century reign was marked by extreme repression and isolationism. Her rise was enabled by dynastic succession and court politics in a society where queenship, while unusual, was not inconceivable. Her brutality, often emphasised in historical accounts, served in part to neutralise challenges from male elites by demonstrating an uncompromising command of violence in a political culture that equated authority with ruthlessness.

What unites these female autocrats is not a feminisation of dictatorship, but its opposite. Each rose within systems that were already authoritarian, patriarchal and exclusionary. Their success depended upon exceptional circumstances, dynastic accidents or personal brilliance, rather than broad access for women to power. None presided over a political culture that made female dictatorship reproducible or normal.

The rarity of women dictators therefore tells us less about women’s capacity for authoritarianism than about the gendered pathways to power. Dictatorship is not merely a personal choice or psychological disposition. It is the end-point of institutional funnels that privilege those who control violence, command loyalty through fear and embody culturally sanctioned authority. For most of history, these funnels have been constructed for men.

As societies broaden access to political authority, professionalise militaries and subject power to legal constraint, dictatorship itself becomes harder to sustain, for women and men alike. The question is not why there are so few women dictators, but why dictatorship has flourished in systems that systematically exclude women from power in the first place. In that sense, the masculinity of dictatorship is not an anomaly. It is a mirror held up to the political structures that produced it.