THE BIAS, THE GAP AND THE HIERARCHY. WHAT WOMEN KNOW ABOUT POLITICS AND HOW TO MEASURE IT

This doctoral dissertation proposes a reflection on the consequences for gender-based research brough about by the way the wider public conceptualises women and men’s role in society – i.e., as a dichotomy between private/public. Despite much has changed in gender cultures, this thesis argues how this binary conception is still strong and hard to undermine because of a constant enforcing feedback loop: it is widely supported in public opinion, it is promoted through gender socialisation processes, and, ultimately, it is reiterated in how gender-based research is carried out. This project analyses two cases where the biases superimposed by gender-based conceptualisations may be distorting the data collected by social and political research. It first analyses public opinion in reference to attitudes towards gender roles. Methodologically, the analysis involved multilevel models to study both individual and contextual factors that may influence gender cultures, allowing for cross-country comparison. The results show that societies – although to very different degrees – still perceive the private and the public as distinct societal spheres and that women’s range of actions is inescapably linked to the former. Yet, social research methodology might be placing disproportionate attention to measuring the attitudes towards the traditional role of women in the family. In fact, in the standardised methodology that measures the attitudes towards gender roles, there is little space dedicated to measuring attitudes towards women in a public role and to men in a family role. Secondly, this dissertation analyses the gender gaps in political knowledge and interest. It does so by employing a series of experiments. The results show that knowledge gaps are of qualitative and not merely of quantitative nature and that they depend on the gendered experience of individuals. In fact, gaps are in favour of men, and large, so long as politics is associated exclusively to the imaginary of political institutions. This is because men are more interested, knowledgeable as well as involved in political institutions when compared to women. Instead, when politics is juxtaposed to a wider array of political topics - e.g., public policies on maternity leave or unemployment benefits – women know as much as, ore even more, than men. yet, as traditional methodology often evokes political institutions to measure both knowledge and interest in politics, this dissertation wishes not only to point out this bias, but also to provide an alternative methodology than can capture more naturally knowledge and interest rid of this concepyual bias.