Blaming men for war isn’t feminist, it’s an intolerable and lazy cliché

You can’t prove a negative, it is said, so we may never know whether Sheryl Sandberg is right that “no two countries run by women would ever go to war”. Statistically, it does seem unlikely: there have never been more than 18 countries led by women at any one time (out of 195 countries recognised by the UN). Any female leader bent on fighting another female leader would have slim pickings.

But Sandberg – chief operating officer of what used to be Facebook, and is now the sinister-sounding Meta – wasn’t talking about mathematical probabilities. What she meant was, women are better. We are wiser, more collaborative, less aggressive, more humane. We wouldn’t go to war because we have a deep, intuitive understanding of what really matters in this world: love and babies and rainbows and peace.

I have always found it trying, the gloating tone that accompanies this tired (and unwittingly sexist) trope. Now I find it intolerable. How could anyone watch the footage of red-eyed Ukrainian men pressing their hands against train windows, waving to their wives and children for what might be the last time, bracing themselves to take up arms in a fight that most are wholly untrained and unsuited for, and think – this seems like a good moment for a cheap ideological dig at half the human race?

True, Vladimir Putin is a man. But so is Volodymyr Zelensky: the voice-ofpaddington-turned reluctant resistance hero. So are those Ukrainian soldiers carrying children and the elderly out of the rubble. So is that father weeping as he cradles his dead teenage son. The idea that only women feel in their bones the horror of war is so wilfully stupid – so lacking in “feminine” empathy – that one can only marvel at it being voiced by an apparently intelligent woman.

As for the assumption that women are less aggressive than men: this is obviously true at a population level. Violent crime is an overwhelmingly male vice, and psychological research has found that women do indeed tend to be better than men at collaborating and finding compromises. But individuals seldom conform to population-level generalisations. And politics is such a brutal business that no one, male or female, gets to the top unless they have a wide streak of ruthlessness.

In fact, female politicians often go out of their way to prove how tough and unsentimental they are (looking at you, Priti Patel), precisely in order to distance themselves from the stereotype of the soft, pacifistic woman. This may explain why, according to research by American academics, countries with female leaders are actually more likely to go to war. (Another reason is that female leaders don’t get taken seriously when they make threats, so they take up arms to prove their point.) Most of the great queens of history, from Catherine the Great to Elizabeth I, dipped their hands in blood. More recently, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher and Chandrika Kumaratunga all led their countries in war.

Sandberg thinks she is being a good feminist, when she is merely parroting clichés. Right now, there are thousands of women fleeing Ukraine in search of safety. But there are also mothers depositing their children across the border in Poland and then returning to their home towns to take up arms. Women can be so many things, including angry, vengeful, reckless and astonishingly brave.