Opening the Attitudinal Black Box: Three Dimensions of Latin American Elites’ Attitudes about Gender Equality

Abstract

This paper takes one of the first, direct approaches to understanding which factors shape which attitudes towards gender equality among political elites. We examine support for gender equality among legislators in 13 Latin American countries, using 10 new questions from the 2015–2018 wave of the Latin American elites survey (PELA). We argue that legislators’ attitudes about gender equality fall into three distinct dimensions: holding egalitarian views, recognizing that gender inequality is a problem, and supporting state action to hasten gender equality. Overall, women express the more gender-equal orientation on all three dimensions, while factors like religiosity and ideology matter differently for different dimensions. These findings demonstrate the need for more nuance in measuring and analyzing attitudes towards gender equality, in order to better understand the link between descriptive and substantive representation.

Effect of Personality Traits and Demographics on the Employment Status of Latin American Students

“…These results can be explained by women's responsibility for caring for the home and children in some countries (Alfarran et al, 2018;Bastas and Aydindag, 2020) and by health problems that can hinder women's participation in work activities (Amiri, 2022;Tüzün et al, 2021). Moreover, important differences in social roles between women and men have been identified in several countries (Mustafa and Almazrouei°, 2020;Alexander et al, 2022), and significant gender gaps in access to work and income levels for the same job have been found in Latin America (Camps-Cura, 2019; Galperin and Arcidiacono, 2021). According to these findings, it can be proposed that gender should be a determinant of self-employment, dependent employment and not working.…”