Gender Gaps in Modern Sexism: Period Effects and Generational Dynamics in Spain

Recent studies have documented a growing ideological divide between young men and women across wealthy democracies, with young women increasingly leaning left while young men show more conservative attitudes (The Economist, 2024). Spain exemplifies this trend, with recent surveys showing 52% of young men—versus 28% of young women—believing gender equality efforts now discriminate against men (CIS, 2023). Building on literature linking modern sexism to electoral backlash (Anduiza and Rico, 2022), this paper examines the temporal evolution of gender gaps in modern sexism attitudes in Spain between 2017-2023. Using panel data from POLAT surveys (N=~1700/year), we employ Age-Period-Cohort (APC) analysis and fixed-effects panel models to disentangle temporal effects and control for unobserved individual heterogeneity. Our analysis of three components of modern sexism (denial of discrimination, opposition to protest, and resistance to equality policies) reveals a period effect following the 2018 feminist mobilizations, with increased modern sexism across demographic groups after 2019. This backlash manifests differently across gender and age cohorts. While the gender gap in modern sexism widens across all generations, it becomes particularly pronounced among younger cohorts by 2023, driven primarily by a sharp increase in young men's opposition to feminist claims and equality policies rather than denial of discrimination. Trend decomposition analysis shows that opposition to corrective policies, rather than denial of discrimination, drives the growing gender gap. Our results contribute to understanding how gender gaps in political attitudes evolve through the interaction of period effects and generational dynamics, while highlighting the importance of distinguishing between different dimensions of modern sexism when analyzing temporal trends.