discourages a sense of connection with politics among women.
A third, overarching explanation is that gender differences in political knowledge are a legacy of the past. Women were once socialised into occupying domestic roles as wives, mothers and home-makers, whereas men were expected to be the principal breadwinner and to be dominant in public life. Although this ‘two spheres’ ideology has been rejected increasingly, as more women go out to paid work and participate politically, this ideology has left an enduring imprint in many countries. In Britain, for example, only one out of 11 Supreme Court judges, only four out of 100 FTSE CEOs, and only 24 per cent of MPS, are women. But as women’s access to socio-economic resources increases, it would seem reasonable to assume that gender differences will tend to equalise. The evidence of this study is rather equivocal. On the one hand, women in wealthy countries with a high investment in education, such as the UK, are better informed about public affairs than women in a poor country like Colombia. Likewise women
in countries high in the global gender equality ranking, like Norway, are better informed than their counterparts in countries like South Korea and Japan which are lower down the global ranking. Improvements in education and greater gender equality seem to go hand-in-hand with knowing more about public affairs. But in these ‘advanced’ nations, men are doing
even better. The knowledge gap between men and women – that is the difference between the correct answers to questions about public affairs between men and women – is actually higher in Britain than in Colombia, and this is true also in Norway compared with Japan and South Korea. This suggests that the past is casting a long shadow. The path to greater gender equality, in terms of political knowledge, is strewn with rocks and debris deposited from a previous age. n
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James Curran is Professor of Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London and Kaori Hayashi is Professor, Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, University of Tokyo.
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www.gold.ac.uk AUTUMN 2013 SOCIETY NOW 23
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