International democracy promoters now treat elections and women’s rights as “bundled norms:” states’ performance is evaluated, and rewards distributed, in response to compliance on either dimension. Dictatorships that fail to make progress toward electoral competition can therefore attempt to camouflage their noncompliance by introducing advances in gender equality; and such measures are often entirely consistent with the perpetuation of autocratic rule. We term this strategy ‘obfuscation,’ and we present a theory that identifies the conditions under which incentives to obfuscate are strongest. Using a new dataset of de jure advances in women’s rights in 130 countries from 1996-2015, we show that dictatorships have been active in passing gender-related legislation, at a rate that surpasses democracies in the developing world. This is driven by variation in international (Western) economic and social pressure: in autocracies, aid dependence and international nongovernmental organization (INGO) shaming is associated with legal advances in women's rights, but not with advances in electoral liberalization. In democracies, however, aid dependence is not associated with women's rights legislation, suggesting that this is a strategy that is more pronounced in dictatorships. Our account therefore demonstrates differences in how autocracies and democracies respond to international pressure, and highlights the potentially perverse consequences of issue linkage in international regimes.