It's Not Gender — It's Sexism: What 97 Studies Reveal About Political Attitudes

The Review

  <p>Political scientists have long known that men and women vote differently. The "gender gap" in U.S. elections has been a fixture since 1980, with women consistently leaning more Democratic than men. But a new systematic review asks a sharper question: is it being a woman that drives political attitudes, or is it <em>beliefs about women</em>?</p>

  <p>Michał Gulczyński, a PhD researcher at the European University Institute in Florence, analyzed 97 quantitative, survey-based, peer-reviewed studies examining the link between sexist attitudes and political behavior. His review, published in <em>Public Opinion Quarterly</em>, concludes that sexism is "often a stronger predictor of political preferences than gender itself."<sup><a href="#s1">[1]</a></sup></p>

  <div>
    <div>
      <span>97</span>
      <span>Studies reviewed</span>
    </div>
    <div>
      <span>75</span>
      <span>U.S.-focused</span>
    </div>
    <div>
      <span>39</span>
      <span>About the 2016 election</span>
    </div>
    <div>
      <span>61</span>
      <span>Measured hostile sexism</span>
    </div>
  </div>

  <h2>A Taxonomy of Sexisms</h2>

  <p>The review doesn't treat sexism as monolithic. Decades of social psychology have established that prejudice toward women operates through at least three measurably distinct channels, each with different political consequences.</p>

  <div>
    <div>
      <h3>Hostile Sexism</h3>
      <p>Overtly negative attitudes toward women who challenge traditional gender hierarchies. Views women seeking power or equality as a threat.</p>
      <p>Sample item: "Women seek to gain power by getting control over men."</p>
      <p>Measured via the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (Glick &amp; Fiske, 1996).<sup><a href="#s3">[3]</a></sup></p>
    </div>
    <div>
      <h3>Benevolent Sexism</h3>
      <p>Subjectively positive attitudes that place women on a pedestal — emphasizing their moral purity, need for protection, and complementary role to men. Patronizing rather than hostile, but still subordinating.</p>
      <p>Sample item: "Women, compared to men, tend to have a superior moral sensibility."</p>
      <p>Measured via the same ASI, but a separate subscale.<sup><a href="#s3">[3]</a></sup></p>
    </div>
    <div>
      <h3>Modern Sexism</h3>
      <p>Denial that discrimination against women persists, resentment of women's demands for equality, and opposition to policies designed to address gender gaps.</p>
      <p>Sample item: "Discrimination against women is no longer a problem in the United States."</p>
      <p>Measured via the Modern Sexism Scale (Swim et al., 1995).<sup><a href="#s4">[4]</a></sup></p>
    </div>
  </div>

  <p>Glick and Fiske's theory identifies three sources of ambivalence underlying hostile and benevolent sexism: <em>paternalism</em> (dominative vs. protective), <em>gender differentiation</em> (competitive vs. complementary), and <em>heterosexuality</em> (hostility vs. intimacy). A person can score high on both hostile and benevolent dimensions — the two are correlated but distinct.<sup><a href="#s3">[3]</a></sup></p>

  <h2>What the Evidence Shows</h2>

  <p>Across the 97 studies, the consistent finding is that sexist attitudes — particularly hostile and modern sexism — predict political behavior even after controlling for gender, party identification, and other demographics. The political effects break down by type:</p>

  <table>
    <thead>
      <tr>
        <th>Sexism Type</th>
        <th>Political Effect</th>
      </tr>
    </thead>
    <tbody>
      <tr>
        <td><strong>Hostile</strong></td>
        <td>Lower support for female candidates; higher support for far-right parties and populist candidates; opposition to feminist policy</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td><strong>Modern</strong></td>
        <td>Opposition to equal pay legislation, paid family leave, and gender quotas; reduced support for female candidates</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td><strong>Benevolent</strong></td>
        <td>Opposition to abortion access; sometimes <em>increased</em> support for female candidates facing aggressive attacks</td>
      </tr>
    </tbody>
  </table>

  <p>The distinction matters. A voter scoring high on benevolent sexism might rally to a female candidate's defense when she is attacked — the "protection" impulse — while simultaneously opposing her reproductive rights platform. Meanwhile, a voter scoring high on modern sexism might express no personal hostility toward women but systematically oppose every policy aimed at addressing gender inequality.<sup><a href="#s1">[1]</a></sup></p>

  <h2>The 2016 Lab</h2>

  <p>The 2016 U.S. presidential election — the first in which a woman headed a major-party ticket while her opponent made openly sexist remarks — produced an explosion of research. Thirty-nine of the 97 reviewed studies examined that single contest.</p>

  <p>The evidence is clear: hostile sexism predicted Trump support and Clinton opposition, even controlling for party, ideology, race, and economic anxiety. Schaffner, MacWilliams, and Nteta (2018) found that sexist attitudes were a strong predictor of voting for Trump over Clinton among white voters.<sup><a href="#s5">[5]</a></sup></p>

  <p>But an important nuance emerged from a separate two-wave panel study (N=489 pre-election, N=192 post-election): when modern racism was included alongside hostile sexism in the same model, <strong>modern racism was the more consistent predictor</strong> across all outcome variables, and hostile sexism lost its unique significance for actual vote choice. Benevolent sexism was generally not significantly related to 2016 voting at all.<sup><a href="#s6">[6]</a></sup></p>

  <div>
    <strong>A caveat on 2016:</strong> The concentration of research on a single, extraordinary election limits generalizability. The 2016 race featured a uniquely gendered contest (first female major-party nominee vs. a candidate with documented sexist rhetoric). Whether sexism operates as strongly in races without these dynamics remains an open question — and one the review itself flags.
  </div>

  <h2>Beyond Gender Issues</h2>

  <p>One of the review's more striking findings is that sexism predicts political attitudes <em>beyond</em> gender-specific policy. Gulczyński found correlations between sexist attitudes and:</p>

  <ul>
    <li>Opposition to climate change policies</li>
    <li>Negative attitudes toward immigrants</li>
    <li>Support for far-right and populist movements broadly</li>
  </ul>

  <p>This suggests sexism may function less as a single-issue attitude and more as a component of a broader worldview organized around hierarchy, tradition, and resistance to social change.<sup><a href="#s1">[1]</a></sup></p>

  <h2>Complications and Contradictions</h2>

  <p>The research on benevolent sexism reveals a genuinely paradoxical pattern. A Frontiers in Political Science study (N=1,400 web panelists + N=4,270 ANES respondents) found that benevolent sexism was <em>positively</em> associated with support for the #MeToo movement — the opposite of what researchers expected. The authors argue this makes internal sense: benevolent sexism emphasizes women's moral superiority and need for protection, both of which align with #MeToo's framing of women as victims requiring defense.<sup><a href="#s2">[2]</a></sup></p>

  <p>The same study found that hostile and modern sexism had clearly distinct political signatures. Hostile sexism predicted opposition to reproductive rights (abortion access, birth control funding, Planned Parenthood). Modern sexism predicted opposition to economic gender policies (equal pay, paid family leave). These are <em>different voters</em> opposing <em>different policies</em> for <em>different reasons</em>, all under the umbrella of "sexism."<sup><a href="#s2">[2]</a></sup></p>

  <p>A Dutch vignette experiment (N=13,489) added another dimension: gender bias in candidate evaluation is conditional on partisanship. Green party voters preferred female candidates; populist radical-right voters preferred male ones. Voters in mainstream left and right parties showed no significant gender bias at all. This creates a structural paradox: the parties with the worst gender representation face the greatest electoral penalty for correcting it.<sup><a href="#s7">[7]</a></sup></p>

  <h2>The Measurement Problem</h2>

  <p>Gulczyński flags a fundamental challenge: the dominant instruments are old. The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory dates to 1996. The Modern Sexism Scale dates to 1995. Both were developed and validated primarily on Western, educated samples.</p>

  <blockquote>
    "Caution is needed whenever we interpret associations between sexism and political behavior, especially as some gender gaps have even reversed, such as in educational attainment."
    <cite>— Michał Gulczyński<sup><a href="#s1">[1]</a></sup></cite>
  </blockquote>

  <p>The point is not that the instruments are invalid — they remain psychometrically sound with high internal reliability<sup><a href="#s3">[3]</a></sup><sup><a href="#s4">[4]</a></sup> — but that sexism itself has changed shape. When women now earn more bachelor's degrees than men and some traditionally male-dominated metrics have flipped, items like "Discrimination against women is no longer a problem" may capture something different in 2026 than they did in 1995.</p>

  <p>This is not hypothetical. Researchers working on measurement optimization have noted that the ASI and Modern Sexism Scale are "conceptually and empirically interchangeable" in some contexts, which muddies the neat three-category taxonomy that the review relies on.<sup><a href="#s8">[8]</a></sup></p>

  <h2>The Widening Gender Gap</h2>

  <p>The review lands at a moment when the gender divide in politics is accelerating, not stabilizing — especially among the youngest voters. Gallup data shows women aged 18–30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries, a gap that opened in roughly six years. An NBC News survey of over 30,000 adults found a 21-point gender gap in Trump approval among Gen Z (47% of young men approve vs. 26% of young women).<sup><a href="#s9">[9]</a></sup></p>

  <p>This polarization extends beyond voting into fundamental life priorities. Gen Z men who backed Trump ranked having children as their top measure of personal success; Gen Z women who backed Harris ranked it second to last.<sup><a href="#s9">[9]</a></sup></p>

  <p>These patterns track with Gulczyński's finding — if sexist attitudes predict political behavior more strongly than gender, then a generation in which men and women hold increasingly divergent views on gender equality should, by definition, show an increasingly divergent politics. The gender gap in <em>voting</em> may be downstream of the gender gap in <em>sexism</em>.</p>

  <h2>What We Don't Know</h2>

  <p>The review is honest about its limits:</p>

  <ul>
    <li><strong>Causation.</strong> Nearly all evidence is correlational. Does sexism drive political preferences, or do political preferences drive self-reported sexism? Panel studies offer some temporal ordering but can't rule out reciprocal causation.</li>
    <li><strong>Geography.</strong> 75 of 97 studies are U.S.-based. The few non-American studies (New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Spain, UK) offer fragmentary coverage of political systems with very different gender dynamics.</li>
    <li><strong>Sexism toward men.</strong> Almost no research examines whether attitudes about men — male disposability, expectations of toughness, hostility toward "soft" masculinity — predict political behavior. Gulczyński is developing studies in this direction, including possible links to attitudes toward military service.</li>
    <li><strong>Demographics.</strong> The review found almost no research examining how the sexism–politics link varies across age, class, education level, or urban-rural geography.</li>
    <li><strong>Intersectionality.</strong> How sexism interacts with racism in driving political behavior is under-explored. The Cokley et al. (2020) two-wave study found that modern racism absorbed hostile sexism's predictive power when both were in the model, suggesting these prejudices are entangled in ways the current literature hasn't fully untangled.<sup><a href="#s6">[6]</a></sup></li>
  </ul>

  <p>The core finding — that what you believe about women predicts your politics better than being one — is robust across nearly a hundred studies. But the field that produced that finding is itself geographically narrow, temporally concentrated on a single election, and working with measurement tools designed before the internet existed. The next generation of research will need to catch up with a world where the gender dynamics that birthed these instruments have changed faster than the instruments themselves.</p>