Scholars have long documented the persistence of gendered attitudes in advanced democracies. Yet, these attitudes are not expressed in a vacuum: individuals often adapt their responses to the perceived social context. This paper examines how the gender of the interviewer affects how respondents express their views on gender equality. Drawing on data from European Social Survey, which includes both gender attitude items and interviewer characteristics, I test whether respondents provide less sexist answers when interviewed by a woman rather than a man.
I argue that interviewer gender functions as a situational cue, activating different levels of social desirability pressure and revealing the strength of anti-sexism norms in respondents’ social environment. By exploiting the quasi-random allocation of interviewers within each country, I isolate the effect of interviewer gender on reported attitudes, net of respondents’ sociodemographic characteristics. I then examine how this effect varies by respondent gender, generation, and national context. This approach allows me to move beyond the measurement of “absolute” sexist attitudes and to capture contextual activation of sexism.
Preliminary descriptive evidence suggests that sexist attitudes are significantly less likely to be openly expressed when the interviewer is a woman, particularly among younger men. This pattern indicates that norms against sexism are not uniformly internalized but are situational and unevenly enforced. The paper contributes to three debates: (1) the political relevance of gender norms and their activation, (2) the methodological implications of interviewer effects for the measurement of gender attitudes, and (3) the broader understanding of how sexism operates as both an individual disposition and a socially regulated behavior. More broadly, it highlights how survey interactions themselves provide a valuable lens to study norm salience and norm compliance in contemporary societies.
Overall, the paper demonstrates that interviewer effects are not mere measurement artifacts but windows into the social regulation of belief expression. It contributes both to methodological debates on survey validity and to substantive discussions of how gender norms are maintained, contested, and contextually activated.
