Searching for Convincing Explanations of the Gender Gap in Knowledge

This paper attempts to shed new light on the factors that account for the apparent gender gap in political knowledge. Actually, we have designed a face to face survey representative of the Spanish population (18-99 years old) which aims at measuring levels of political knowledge among Spaniards. The scope of the survey, however, is not limited to standard measures of political knowledge, and has been open to more and more diverse items. It is thank to this new survey that we can simultaneously test in this paper several of the classical (and not so classical) explanations of differences in levels of political knowledge between men and women. In particular, several alternative explanations are considered in the paper. Firstly, we test whether the gender gap in knowledge is a product of the fact that men and women are situated differently in the social structure; have lower material resources than men, and more burden of work and responsibility than men. Given these differences, women would have less time to get informed and known about politics. Secondly, more recent developments in the literature pose the fact that differences between men and women on what they appear to know or don’t know about politics are only apparent, and in no way imply that women know less than men. The argument is that women answer survey questions differently. On the one hand, men are more willing to guess than women; this creates an inflated indicator of men’s political knowledge in comparison to women. On the other hand, measures of political knowledge seem to be biased, in that they systematically exclude women’s interests. Lastly, we consider exposure to different media as a possible explanation of gender differences in political knowledge.