Green Ideas on Gender: Examining the Gender Effect on Environmental Concern in a Multilevel Analysis

Gender has been traditionally used as a control variable in studies dealing with environmental concern. In most cases research show that women are more environmental concerned than men. We distinguish four approaches that attempt to explain that fact: biological, cultural, structural and political. Using multilevel regression techniques and data from World Values Survey (6^th wave, 2010-2014) we reject the biological, cultural and structural hypotheses, and following ecofeminism we propose an explanation based on feminist ideology rather than on gender differences. According to our data women are more pro-environmental because they are more likely to be feminist than men, but once that feminism is introduced as a control variable the effect of gender disappears. Nevertheless unlike ecofeminism we do not hold that feminism raises environmental awareness per se. Actually we observe differences by country regarding the effect of feminism on environmental concern. We consider the different traditions of feminism and ecologism as key factors to explain this variation.