Learning gender equality: how women’s protest influences youth gender attitudes

Current comparative analyses of gender attitudes among adolescents largely focus on individual-level characteristics. Understudied is the role of women’s protest on adolescents’ gender attitudes. This paper investigates how women’s protests reported in national news shape young citizens’ gender attitudes across 32 countries. Using the IEA International Civic and Citizenship Study survey data (2009), we test whether women’s protests have a positive impact on egalitarian gender attitudes among adolescents. Our multi-level models demonstrate that girls are more egalitarian in their gender attitudes than boys. The gap between boys and girls changes depending on the level of gender equality in a country. In countries with lower gender equality, the gender gap increases slightly as the number of women’s protests increases, although the difference is not significant. In countries where gender equality is already high, the gender gap is significant at all levels of protest but narrows as protest increases. Our findings expand scholars’ understanding of how protest influences public opinion among young people and have important implications for how gender attitude change occurs and whether women’s protest serves as a tool for developing gender equality.