In recent years, commentaries and essays in Nature have called for more nuanced investigations of gender and sex which extend beyond the binary understanding of male and female. Their calls draw on and echo novel work from a number of fields demonstrating the scientific shortcomings of a binary concept. While social and biological sciences alike have questioned the validity of binary frameworks, large-scale survey research often continues to rely on dichotomous measures of gender. Departing from traditions, we report the results from a cross-national survey that measures gender continuously across 20 countries representing all continents (N = 11, 713). Exemplified through analyses of the relationship between gender and political orientations we highlight the importance of measuring gender continuously: Individuals who identify in more gender typical ways (i.e., women (men) identifying as very feminine (masculine) express more right-wing political orientations, and prefer right-wing candidates in a conjoint candidate choice experiment. Importantly, intra-sex differences between gender typical and atypical individuals exceeds differences between women and men. While strong cross-country consistency obtains for political orientations, country-level analyses reveal that gender typical identification predicts preferences for right-wing candidates more strongly in more post-materialist countries. In sum, these results stress the importance of applying a non-binary measurement strategy of gender as traditional binary measures likely misses substantial explained variance and important contextual (here country-level) differences. Finally, readers are pointed to other social science research areas which in the future will possibly benefit from applying continuous measures of gender identification.
