Feminization of Work and Political Backlash

• In Event: Gender and Political Backlash

Abstract

This paper investigates how the ‘feminization’ of occupations affects gender-egaltitarian attitudes and voting for the radical right. While support for the radical right is often linked to cultural backlash or economic anxiety due to socio-economic transformations, new studies combine economic and cultural perspectives and analyze how perceptions of social status affect radical right support. We build on this literature and incorporate a factor that so far has been overlooked in these analyses: variation in gender distribution in occupations. Anti-feminist discourse plays an increasingly important role in radical right mobilization (Mudde 2019) and we may expect that men in occupations with larger shares of female employees, and/or men in occupations that become increasingly ‘female’, should be more susceptible for these appeals for two reasons. First, increasing shares of women can be associated with decreasing wages in a profession. Second, men may perceive it as a status loss to work in a more ‘feminized’ occupation. Alternatively, men may be less sensitive to radical right parties because of their increased contact with women that would reduce gender prejudice. We test these hypotheses using the European Social Survey in twelve countries across nine rounds (2002-2018). We find that, individuals -mostly men-are less likely to support radical right parties as the share of women employees increases but they are more likely to support these parties as the change in the share of women employees increases. Also, as occupations ‘feminize’ over time, individuals in male-dominated occupations become more supportive of radical right parties than individuals in female-dominated occupations. We will complement this cross-sectional study with a panel data to test the mechanisms underlying these findings.

Authors

• Diane Bolet, University of Zurich

• Tarik Abou-Chadi, University of Oxford

• Sergi Pardos-Prado, University of Glasgow

• Catherine E. De Vries, Bocconi University

• Paula Rettl, Harvard Business School

• Simone Cremaschi, Bocconi University