For more than 50 years, researchers have kept stumbling on the same quiet pattern. Ask people how much they worry about pollution, climate change, the future of the planet, and women, on average, worry more. The finding first surfaced in the United States in the 1970s, then in Australia, then across Western Europe, so reliably that it earned a name: the green gender gap. And yet, no one has been able to say convincingly why it exists.
It is in this gap between a well-documented pattern and a missing explanation that Ingvild Zinober situates her work. A recent graduate of the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences, Ingvild has spent her doctoral years tracing the green gender gap across Europe and asking two deceptively simple questions: How far does it really reach, and where does it come from? Her recent paper in Electoral Studies answers the first. Drawing on more than 20 years of European Social Survey data covering 36 countries, it confirms that the gap is not a quirk of a few wealthy Western democracies. Women in Europe are more concerned about the environment, worry more about climate change, feel a stronger sense of personal responsibility to act, and are more supportive of climate policies. This is true almost everywhere the survey reaches, including in Southern and Central and Eastern Europe, regions long assumed to be less fertile ground for this kind of concern.
The gap also turned out to be hard to explain. Ingvild tested the usual explanations one by one: education, occupation, where people live, how risk-averse they are, where they place themselves on the left and right. None of them made the gap disappear. “Controlling for education and controlling for occupation, the gap is still there,” she says. Women are greener than men even when you compare women and men with the same schooling, the same jobs, the same politics. Whatever is driving the pattern, it is not the tidy structural story political science usually reaches for.
But concern is one thing, and a vote is another, and here Ingvild’s paper takes its most interesting turn. The attitudinal gap may be pan-European, but its political expression is not. In Northern and Western Europe, where green parties are large and established, women's stronger environmental concern translates cleanly into greener votes: They are measurably more likely than men to choose a green party, or one running on a pro-environmental platform. In Southern and Central and Eastern Europe, that link largely breaks. In Central and Eastern Europe in particular, women back climate policy more than men but are no more likely to vote green at all.
The reason, Ingvild argues, lies less with voters than with what is on the ballot. Green parties in Northern and Western Europe regularly take around 10% of the vote; in Southern and Central and Eastern Europe, their share often sits below three. And a small party, her analysis suggests, simply cannot mobilise the gap: The gender difference in green voting only becomes visible once a green party climbs to roughly 10 to 15% support. Below that threshold, even environmentally concerned voters may not see a green vote as worth casting. “People don't want to lose their votes,” she explains. “If the green party is very small and won't get any power in parliament, maybe you don't prioritise a green vote.”
Her own country offers a neat illustration. In Norway, the issue of climate and environment long belonged to the Socialist Left party; green-minded voters went there, and there was no gender gap in voting for the Greens, because the Greens were not yet a serious option. Then the political landscape shifted, the Green party became viable, and “from the moment they entered parliament, the gap appeared," she says. The concern had been there all along. What changed was the credibility of the option.
All of this tells us where the gap becomes political, and under what conditions. What it cannot tell us is why the gap is there in the first place: why, before any party enters the picture, women should feel more strongly about the environment than men at all. That is the question that has gone unanswered for half a century, and it is the one that has occupied Ingvild since well before this paper. It is also where her thinking turns most original, because the place she looks for an answer is not politics but identity.
"I basically came to the EUI with a question and no answers," she recalls. "I didn't have any clue what the answer would be." Her master's research, on gender gaps in political attitudes in Norway, had thrown up something she could not ignore: Of all the issues dividing women and men, the green dimension produced the widest gap of all. "So, I just chose the biggest gap, and I asked: Why do we have the biggest gap here?"
Her first instinct was a story of self-interest – perhaps women lean green because a green transition costs them less, since they are less likely to work in oil or other extractive industries. But the data refused to cooperate; once she controlled for occupation, the gap stood firm. As a result, she went looking in an entirely different direction and began building a theoretical framework she calls ‘political gender performativity’. The idea, drawing on sociology, psychology, and gender studies, is that the political opinions we hold and express are themselves a form of gender performance – as much a part of how we signal who we are through the way we dress or speak. "Voting correctly according to what your context is telling you about how you should behave," as she puts it. In other words, absorbing, often without noticing, which attitudes are seen as appropriate for women and which for men.
Within that frame, the green gender gap starts to look less like a puzzle and more like a symptom. Caring about the environment, Ingvild argues, has become culturally coded as feminine, for two reasons. The first is old. She points to the historical association between women and nature traced by the ecofeminist scholar Carolyn Merchant in The Death of Nature – a deep cultural pairing of women with the natural, the wild, and the nurturing, and of men with society, reason, and control. The second is contemporary, and concerns how climate politics actually sounds. "Climate action is often argued through a care-oriented ethos," she says. Furthermore, she esplains that caring for nature, protecting animals, looking after the planet, giving something up for the next generation are precisely the virtues a traditional culture associates with femininity. The result is an issue that can feel, to some men, quietly off-limits.
Her dissertation puts some empirical weight behind the intuition. Among people for whom traditional gender roles are central to their sense of self, for whom being a man, and scoring high on masculinity, is core to their identity, support for climate and environmental issues drops. Just as telling is the mirror image: Among men for whom traditional gender roles are not important to their identity, the gap with women all but vanishes. "There is a group of men who are much more similar to women," she notes. The dividing line, in other words, may run less between the sexes than through our ideas about them.
That reading also helps explain a finding that surprises many: The gap is widest not among older voters but among the youngest - those born after 1997 -, and it may be widening rather than closing. This is not because young people are turning away from the climate; quite the opposite. "Younger generations are more progressive on climate," Ingvild says. But among the politically engaged, the issue has become gendered in how it is taken up. "When girls are politically activated, they are more likely to take up climate as their thing," she explains. Meanwhile, engaged boys gravitate to other causes, according to Ingvild. Interest has grown among young men too, she is careful to say. It has simply grown faster among young women, and that is what widens the gap. In a forthcoming paper in Politics & Gender, she finds exactly this pattern among Norwegian teenagers: the sharpest divide between the most politically active boys and girls. She suspects a role-model effect compounds it; the people running youth climate groups, she has been told, see far more girls than boys walk through the door.
One mechanism is doing the work: how visible the issue is at any given moment. The gap, Ingvild finds, swells when the issue is loud and shrinks when it goes quiet. During the pandemic, as attention swung to health and security, interest in climate fell, and fell faster among girls, narrowing the gap, before it widened again. Something about mobilisation, she suspects, reaches women more readily, while gender norms hold men back from the same call. "A gap does not appear when there is no mobilisation, but appears when there is," she says.
So, what should follow from all this? Ingvild is refreshingly candid about the limits of her own evidence. The relationship between women's support and green-party success runs both ways – bigger parties mobilise women, but women's mobilisation may be part of what makes those parties bigger – and her data, she stresses, "is correlational, not causal." It cannot untangle the feedback loop between parties and voters. But on one practical point she is clear, and it inverts the usual question. Rather than asking how green parties can win more women, she thinks they should be asking the opposite. "Green parties should have more focus on how to attract male voters," she says. The key, in her words, is understanding what holds men back - whether it is the language they use, the wider policy package, or something about masculine identity itself.
That question now drives her next project. With colleagues, she has applied for funding to study the gendering of climate policy: the idea that different climate measures carry different gendered codes. Policies built around big technological fixes, she hypothesises, may read as masculine, while those asking people to give up meat or status symbols may feel, to some men, like a threat to their identity. The goal is not abstract. "How can men support climate action," she asks, "without that action threatening their gender identity?" In a world that needs climate measures to command broad majorities, the framing may matter as much as the substance.
For Ingvild, the larger ambition reaches beyond the climate altogether. She wants political science to stop treating gender as a nuisance variable – something to be measured once and "controlled away" – and start treating it as a structuring force in its own right. "The effect of gender is not binary," she argues. "It's contextual. It's different for different people, it interacts with other background variables, and it's a structuring force in many people's lives." It is also, she warns, something that can be exploited: Politicians can manufacture support by triggering gender anxieties, a dynamic she believes is more mainstream than we tend to admit.
Understanding how our sense of who we are quietly shapes how we vote is, in the end, what her work is about, and the green gender gap, persistent and unexplained for half a century, turns out to be one of the clearest places to start.
Read the article ‘The green gender gap: environmental attitudes and pro-environmental vote choice across Europe’, published in Electoral studies.
Ingvild Zinober, from the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences, has recently defended her PhD thesis ‘Understanding the Green Gender Gap: how gender role identity shapes environmental ideology and political behaviour’, supervised by Professor Simon Hix. She is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Department.