Political Ideology Outdoes Personal Experience in Predicting Support for Gender Equality

Publikation: Beiträge in ZeitschriftenZeitschriftenaufsätzeForschungbegutachtet

Authors

Indices of gender equality provide an inconsistent picture of current gender inequality in countries with relatively high equality. We examined women's and men's subjectively perceived gender inequality and their support for gender equality in the general population and in politicians, respectively, in three countries with relatively high gender equality: the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany (total N = 1,612). In both women's and men's perceptions, women were treated more unequally than men. However, the inequality that women perceived was larger than the inequality men perceived. Additionally, women reported they personally experience less inequality than women as a group (person-group discrepancy). Finally, women's and men's left/liberal (vs. right/conservative) political ideology turned out to be a relatively more powerful predictor of support for gender equality than perceived personal and societal inequality. We discuss reasons for why political ideology emerged as the strongest predictor of equality support and sketch out implications for policy efforts toward promoting gender equality.

OriginalspracheEnglisch
ZeitschriftPolitical Psychology
Jahrgang44
Ausgabenummer4
Seiten (von - bis)829-855
Anzahl der Seiten27
ISSN0162-895X
DOIs
PublikationsstatusErschienen - 09.2023
Extern publiziertJa

Bibliographische Notiz

Funding Information:
We thank Anna Kende and the motivation colloquium at the University of Hamburg for comments on earlier versions of this research. Thanks also go to three anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions and to Narges Bakthyar, Matthia Kilian, and Christina Münch for their help with collecting the data. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to A. Timur Sevincer, Institute of Psychology, University of Hamburg, Von-Melle-Park 5, 20146 Hamburg, Germany. E-mail: timur.sevincer@uni-hamburg.de. Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Authors. Political Psychology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of International Society of Political Psychology.

DOI