Who’s asking?

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This session of the Political Behaviour Colloquium features a presentation by Noémie Piolat, a PhD Candidate at Sciences Po

Scholars have long documented the persistence of sexist attitudes in European democracies. Yet these attitudes are not expressed in a vacuum: individuals adjust their responses to their immediate social setting, including who they are speaking to. This paper examines how interviewer gender shapes the expression of sexist attitudes using European Social Survey data. I argue that interviewer gender acts as a situational cue, activating social desirability pressures and revealing the strength of anti-sexism norms. Exploiting the quasi-random allocation of interviewers within countries, I estimate the effect of interviewer gender on reported sexist attitudes and examine how it varies across respondents and contexts. In pooled models, respondents report lower levels of sexism when interviewed by a woman, but this average effect conceals substantial heterogeneity. Interviewer effects are stronger in more gender-equal contexts, while in lower-equality settings women sometimes report more sexist attitudes to female interviewers. Among men, the pattern is especially clear: in contexts with a low sexism average, they report less sexism to female interviewers, whereas in contexts with a high sexism average, interviewer effects weaken or reverse. These findings show that expressed sexist attitudes depend jointly on interviewer characteristics and the normative environment in which responses are given.

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