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About this data

Gender of the chief executive
The variable denotes whether the chief executive of government in office on December 31 is a woman.
Source
V-Dem (2026) – processed by Our World in Data
Last updated
March 17, 2026
Next expected update
March 2027
Date range
1789–2025

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

V-Dem – Democracy report

The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project publishes data and research on democracy and human rights.

It acknowledges that democracy can be characterized differently and measures electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian characterizations of democracy.

The project relies on evaluations by around 3,500 country experts and supplementary work by its researchers to assess political institutions and the protection of rights.

The project is managed by the V-Dem Institute, based at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

This snapshot contains all 531 V-Dem indicators and 251 indices + 62 other indicators from other data sources.

For more information, please refer to https://www.v-dem.net/data/the-v-dem-dataset/

Retrieved on
March 17, 2026
Retrieved from
https://v-dem.net/data/the-v-dem-dataset/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, David Altman, Fabio Angiolillo, Michael Bernhard, Agnes Cornell, M. Steven Fish, Linnea Fox, Lisa Gastaldi, Haakon Gjerløw, Adam Glynn, Ana Good God, Sandra Grahn, Allen Hicken, Katrin Kinzelbach, Joshua Krusell, Kyle L. Marquardt, Kelly McMann, Valeriya Mechkova, Juraj Medzihorsky, Natalia Natsika, Anja Neundorf, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Johannes von Römer, Brigitte Seim, Rachel Sigman, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Aksel Sundström, Marcus Tannenberg, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Felix Wiebrecht, Tore Wig, Steven Wilson and Daniel Ziblatt. 2026. "V-Dem [Country-Year/Country-Date] Dataset v16" Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. https://doi.org/10.23696/vdemds26
Pemstein, Daniel, Kyle L. Marquardt, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Juraj Medzihorsky, Joshua Krusell, Farhad Miri, and Johannes von Römer. 2026. "The V-Dem Measurement Model: Latent Variable Analysis for Cross-National and Cross-Temporal Expert-Coded Data". V-Dem Working Paper No. 21. 11th edition. University of Gothenburg: Varieties of Democracy Institute.

The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project publishes data and research on democracy and human rights.

It acknowledges that democracy can be characterized differently and measures electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian characterizations of democracy.

The project relies on evaluations by around 3,500 country experts and supplementary work by its researchers to assess political institutions and the protection of rights.

The project is managed by the V-Dem Institute, based at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

This snapshot contains all 531 V-Dem indicators and 251 indices + 62 other indicators from other data sources.

For more information, please refer to https://www.v-dem.net/data/the-v-dem-dataset/

Retrieved on
March 17, 2026
Retrieved from
https://v-dem.net/data/the-v-dem-dataset/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, David Altman, Fabio Angiolillo, Michael Bernhard, Agnes Cornell, M. Steven Fish, Linnea Fox, Lisa Gastaldi, Haakon Gjerløw, Adam Glynn, Ana Good God, Sandra Grahn, Allen Hicken, Katrin Kinzelbach, Joshua Krusell, Kyle L. Marquardt, Kelly McMann, Valeriya Mechkova, Juraj Medzihorsky, Natalia Natsika, Anja Neundorf, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Johannes von Römer, Brigitte Seim, Rachel Sigman, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Aksel Sundström, Marcus Tannenberg, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Felix Wiebrecht, Tore Wig, Steven Wilson and Daniel Ziblatt. 2026. "V-Dem [Country-Year/Country-Date] Dataset v16" Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. https://doi.org/10.23696/vdemds26
Pemstein, Daniel, Kyle L. Marquardt, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Juraj Medzihorsky, Joshua Krusell, Farhad Miri, and Johannes von Römer. 2026. "The V-Dem Measurement Model: Latent Variable Analysis for Cross-National and Cross-Temporal Expert-Coded Data". V-Dem Working Paper No. 21. 11th edition. University of Gothenburg: Varieties of Democracy Institute.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

Assigns the value based on the gender of the most powerful chief: either Head of state or Head of government.

Uses gender from HOS:

  • If head of state is more powerful than head of government, and head of state is the head of the executive.
  • If head of state is also head of government.
  • If head of government is less powerful than head of state.

Uses HOG if:

  • If head of state is less powerful than head of government

We derive this indicator from V-Dem indicators: v2exfemhos, v2exfemhog, v2ex_hosw, and v2ex_hogw.

Data imputation

Unlike most indicators in this dataset, this one is not extended back in time with the data of the historical entity a country was part of. Who led a country is a fact about that country rather than about the power that ruled its territory earlier, so the years before a country appears in V-Dem's data are left empty.

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Gender of the chief executive”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre, Lucas Rodés-Guirao, and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2013) - “Democracy”. Data adapted from V-Dem. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20261028-153211/grapher/gender-of-chief-executive.html [online resource] (archived on October 28, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

V-Dem (2026) – processed by Our World in Data

Full citation

V-Dem (2026) – processed by Our World in Data. “Gender of the chief executive” [dataset]. V-Dem, “Democracy report v16” [original data]. Retrieved October 28, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20261028-153211/grapher/gender-of-chief-executive.html (archived on October 28, 2026).

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