Challenging the Gender Equality Paradox: Evidence from 50 States, 17 Years, and 21 Million Individuals

How does societal gender equality influence gender gaps at the individual level? Contradictory theoretical perspectives exist on this seemingly intuitive question. While social role theory and the theory of circumscription and compromise suggest that greater parity in society leads to smaller psychological differences between genders, gender-essentialist perspectives suggest the opposite. Over the last decade, a stream of cross-cultural studies supported the latter with paradoxical findings that greater societal gender equality is associated with larger, not smaller, gender differences in preferences, attitudes, and behavioral patterns at the individual level. In this talk, I discuss key limitations in previous studies and challenge the so-called “gender equality paradox” by presenting findings from multilevel modeling with data on the career interests of 21 million U.S. individuals across 50 states over a 17-year time span. I demonstrate divergence in the cross-level effects at the within- and between-state levels, with different gender equality indicators, and across various interest dimensions. This work helps reconcile conflicting theories and empirical findings and offer new and more nuanced insights into policies and interventions aiming at closing gender gaps.