Who Perceives Women’s Rights as Threatening to Men and Boys? Explaining Modern Sexism among Young Men in Europe

Previous research shows that modern sexism predicts political attitudes and behavior that are detrimental to women’s empowerment and liberalism. However, we know little about which factors explain modern sexist attitudes and if there are explanatory factors that are consistent across multiple country contexts. We address this gap by using an original measure that approximates dimensions of modern sexism embedded in the 2020 EQI survey, capturing 30,000 individuals nested in 208 regions in 27 European Union countries. More precisely, the measure captures agreement with the statement that “Advancing women’s and girls’ rights has gone too far because it threatens men’s and boys’ opportunities”. In line with the features of modern sexist attitudes, agreement with this statement implies denial of women’s discrimination and negative attitudes towards women’s demands for equality. While most previous research suggests that younger generations hold generally more liberal values than older generations, our findings show that young men (aged 18-29) are most likely to agree with this statement, compared to women in general and men of other age groups. This is in line with recent research challenging the hypothesis that older citizens are most conservative and younger generations hold more liberal values. Furthermore, this potentially sheds important insights into the more recent backlashes against gender equality observed in European countries. Through interactions with individual-, regional- and national-level factors, we explore various theories explaining why young men are most likely to hold modern sexist attitudes.