Book project

The Climate Gender Gap

Where and Why Men and Women Think Differently about Climate Change
With Sarah Sunn Bush (University of Pennsylvania)

The puzzle

In wealthy democracies, women express more concern about climate change and greater support for climate action than men. But the climate gender gap is not a consistent feature around the world; rather, as countries become richer, women become more likely than men to express concern about our changing climate. What’s more, this gap cannot be explained by general ideological differences. It is most pronounced among supporters of the political right, rather than because men and women tend to identify with different political parties in wealthy democracies.

The argument

We explain this pattern with a theory about the perceived costs and benefits of climate mitigation policy. At the country level, the perceived benefits of mitigation tend to decrease with economic development while the perceived costs increase — richer countries are less exposed to immediate climate harm and more invested in carbon-intensive consumption. At the individual level, the perceived costs of mitigation rise with development more steeply for men than for women, because men bear more of decarbonization’s material costs — in carbon-intensive work and consumption — and more of its social status costs, because these jobs and goods confer social value.

The evidence

We test the theory’s implications with an original survey fielded in fifteen countries, in-depth qualitative work in five of them, and original coding of media coverage and political party manifestos across a wide range of cases, alongside existing cross-national survey data. Together these let us trace how and when climate change becomes politicized, and whether messages developed by political parties to resist climate action resonate more strongly with men than with women. The project was supported by the National Science Foundation (SES #2149224).