Young adults’ gender gap in political knowledge: a life cycle approach

Despite the existence of a gender gap in political knowledge has been largely studied and documented, little attention has been devoted to the fact that the magnitude of the gender gap varies across age, and thus to why and when it appears. Actually, the scarce previous evidence shows that the gender gap is larger among adults than among young people (Jennings and Niemi 1974; Jennings 1996; Hahn 1998) but no studies have examined in depth this remarkable finding. Yet, if the gender gap in knowledge is barely visible among adolescents and young adults, but repetitively observed among adults, attention should be paid to the transition to adulthood as a determinant of the magnitude of the gender gap in political knowledge. Understanding what is going on between adolescence and adulthood that explains an increased gender gap is vital to address one of the most persistent inequalities observed in political engagement. To shed some light into this black box, this paper examines the gender gap in political knowledge as a function of how many and what type of transitional events women and men complete in their life cycle. We study the magnitude of the gender gap at differentiated stages of the transition to adulthood in two European countries, namely, Finland and Spain. The study of these most dissimilar cases in what regards gender differences allows us to 1) observe whether patterns of inequality between women and men are equivalent in such different contexts; and 2) to better assess whether transition to adulthood is inextricably linked to an increase in the gender gap in political knowledge – independently of how equal women and men are in a country. Building on political socialization research and socioeconomic models in political engagement, and accounting for the most recent suggestions on how to measure political knowledge, we propose that gender differences are enlarged the more adult roles women and men acquire, as they experience differently (and are differently favoured by) those adult roles. Most crucially, we observe here whether the pushing mechanisms of the gender gap are easily transposed from one context to the other. Findings show that the gender gap in political knowledge is larger among adults in comparison to young people, and that those differences between men and women appear during young people’s transition to adulthood. Moreover, our findings indicate that having at least one child is particularly relevant in explaining the appearance of the gender gap independently of the occupational status of the mother, and of the degree of gender equality of the society where citizens live.