Understanding Gender Inequality in Political Self-Efficacy in Early Adolescents: Different Measures, Different Gender Gaps

Abstract

Research has shown a persistent gender gap in political self-efficacy across most Western countries. Nevertheless, the regularity in these findings masks the diversity in the measures used to capture this construct and little reflection has been undertaken on the extent that changing the measures has on the size and the direction of the gender gap. This article tests on students aged 14 in 38 countries using the IEA International Civic and Citizenship Education Study, the extent that self-efficacy in the domain of politics is a unidimensional measure and if different gender gaps can be found between self-efficacy measures capturing partisan politics compared to broader citizenship self-efficacy measures. The findings show that it is only partisan political self-efficacy measures where there is a significant gender gap and where girls are disadvantaged. This is the case for 37 out of 38 countries and robust when controlling for different levels of political knowledge. When a broader measure of citizenship self-efficacy is used, there are much less gender differences, and when there is a significant difference, girls outperform boys in 14 out of 38 countries. These contrary findings are similar in the same study when comparing the measures on interest in politics and interest in social issues.