Explaining Gender Differences in Concern about Environmental Problems in the United States
By Chenyang Xiao, Aaron M. McCright. 2012
187 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We examine theoretical arguments explaining gender differences in environmental concern using data from six Gallup surveys in the 2000s. Using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling, we examine the direct and indirect effects of gender and other key variables on two factors of environmental concern: worry about health-related environmental problems and worry about global environmental problems. We find weak but consistent support for the safety concerns hypothesis, which expects that women are more concerned than are men about health-related environmental problems. Our results offer no support for various arguments that men's and women's differential performance of key social roles in society account for gender differences in environmental concern. We find consistent support for the claim that risk perception mediates the direct effect of gender on environmental concern. We end with a discussion of fruitful avenues for future research on gender differences in environmental concern.
Subfields: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c5f8de4eb6f7d2524f8b565246ae23644399bf09
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In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
In Sociology and Political Science
- Tina Braun
- S. van der Linden
- Richard S. Cottrell
- Paul W. Dierkes
- J. Roozenbeek
- J. Reser
- Graham Bradley
- Stephan Lewandowsky
Citations in the corpus
- Gender Differences in Environmental Concern: Reevaluating Gender Socialization (2016, background): “They then extend these value orientations to the environment in order to explain why women are more environmentally concerned than men (see Mohai 1992; Greenbaum 1995; Freudenburg and Davidson 1996; Zelezny et al. 2000; Stern et al. 2002; McCright 2010; Xiao and McCright 2012).”
- Determinants and Measurement of Climate Change Risk Perception, Worry, and Concern (2017, background): “…Concern Hypothesis (Davidson & Freudenburg, 1996; Xiao & McCright, 2012), less evidence is found for the theory that females are less trustful of institutions or that the performance of different societal roles account for gender differences (Cutter et al., 1992; Xiao & McCright, 2012, 2013).”
- Fostering changes in attitude, knowledge and behavior: demographic variation in environmental education effects (2018, background): “A large body of scholarship finds that environmental attitudes are significantly more positive in women compared to men (Dietz, Dan, and Shwom, 2007; Ergas and York 2012; Theodori and Luloff 2002; Xiao and McCright 2012).”