Feminism as a Threat

• In Event: Gender and Political Backlash

Abstract

Far-right voting is often explained as a counter-reaction to cultural change, including to feminism. However, individuals’ perceptions of feminism as a threat have seldom been measured. Using novel survey data on the case of Spain, we explore perceptions of feminism as a threat and analyze its correlates. We conceptualize threat perceptions to involve a component of potential damage as well as a component of vulnerability. We then measure threat perceptions related to material as well as symbolic aspects, both for the individual and the broader collective. Adapting integrated threat theory, we then analyze several factors that may trigger or facilitate perceptions of feminism as a threat, including gender (men being more likely to feel threatened), age (older people more likely to feel threatened), individual resources (people unemployed, in precarious works or unemployed more likely to feel threatened), and values (preference for order vs freedom, authoritarian values, right-wing orientations). Surprisingly, our findings show modest but significant gender and age gaps in the opposite direction of our expectations. Our results also point to a larger relevance of values versus material conditions for threat perceptions. To make sense of our counterintuitive findings and better understand the occurrence of feminist threat perceptions among different population groups, we proceed with an inductive latent profile analysis. Our findings point to the importance of distinguishing between different population subgroups, especially among women. Apolitical, less educated women who spend a lot of time on chores and care work constitute a group that generally feels more threatened, including by feminism. In contrast, liberal left-wing highly educated women feel highly threatened by other phenomena such as Covid-19 and climate change, but not by feminism. Additional Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition analysis shows that women’s higher likelihood to feel threatened by feminism is mostly explained by women feeling more threatened in general, women feeling more anxious, and women in the sample being younger on average. Various covariates affect women’s and men’s perceptions of feminism as threatening similarly, while attitudes toward freedom vs. order and risk aversion affect women less than men. Our paper points to the difficulties of applying the predominant understanding of threats in social science to the case of feminism, and the importance of acknowledging diverse profiles within population subgroups.

Authors

• Eva Anduiza, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

• Gefjon Off, Leuphana University of Lüneburg