Extant scholarship argues that electoral gender quotas are a form of “genderwashing” that autocrats strategically use to make their country appear more democratic. Yet when it comes to the impact of quotas on foreign public opinion, this hypothesis is untested. We conceptualize Gender Diplomacy as the visible, strategic use of women as a public diplomacy and nation branding strategy to improve international perceptions among foreign governments and publics. Using a web-based survey experiment, we randomly expose more than 800 US-based students to a vignette and photo of either an all-male Federal National Council described as having 40 seats or a mixed-gender Council described as having a quota reserving 50 percent of seats for women and assess the impact on respondents’ perceptions of the UAE. Subsequently, we assess the impact on respondents’ perceptions of the level of democracy in the UAE. The results show that Gender Diplomacy increases the extent to which the UAE is seen as democratic, and it does so among nearly all US-based sub-groups. We argue that this effect is due to the implicit association between positive gender-based trait stereotypes such as kindness and trustworthiness and the country of the UAE, suggesting that countries are seen in gendered ways that reflect how the media depicts their leaders. In support of our implicit associations theory, in our analysis of heterogeneous treatment effects, we find that those who hold explicit, positive stereotypes about females as honest are more likely to be shaped by gender diplomacy than those who do not. On no indicator did women in leadership undermine the UAE’s international reputation, suggesting that for the case of the UAE, we detect only benefits and no downside to ensuring that females are the country’s visible leaders. By conceptualizing gender diplomacy and experimentally testing the mechanism underlying its impact on US students’ views of the UAE, our research contributes to debates among scholars and practitioners about the complex effects of women’s empowerment in authoritarian and patriarchal settings. It points to the strong role that cognitive bias in the form of implicit associations play in shaping perceptions and thus the potential for autocrats and others to use Gender Diplomacy to accomplish their public diplomacy objectives.