Deconstructing the Gender-Equality Paradox

Studies advancing the hypothesis of a “gender-equality paradox” have found that societies with more gender equality demonstrate larger gender differences across a range of phenomena. In doing so, they rely on that practice of predicting an algebraic difference score—calculated from mean scores for men and women across a set of countries—with an index of gender equality or some related concept. We argue that direct difference score predictions of this type are impossible to interpret because very different combinations of constituents—mean scores of men and women and properties of these means—can produce identical direct difference score predictions. We reanalyzed three large cross-cultural data sets with 15 variables from three different domains—attitudes toward science and technology, economic preferences, and personality traits—to showcase our method of deconstructing difference score predictions and to investigate to what extent the rhetoric of the gender-equality paradox describes a real phenomenon. The results were highly heterogeneous. For some characteristics, men’s and women’s country-level means varied identically as a function of country-level gender equality (no paradox). For other characteristics, there were differences in how men’s and women’s means varied. Whether these differences could be described in the rhetoric of the paradox varied. More pertinent is the necessity of deconstructing difference score predictions into their constituent components before attempting to answer questions regarding a paradox. It is in the terminology of these components and their properties that future hypotheses should be tested.