Berggren Mathias, Bergh Robin
Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, Uppsala SE-751 42, Sweden.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2025 Jun 10;122(23):e2422247122. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2422247122. Epub 2025 Jun 5.
Several cross-country examinations have found larger gender differences in Western countries. More recently, it has been argued, from an evolutionary standpoint, that equality may paradoxically increase gender differences, because it provides more freedom for men and women to pursue innate preferences. However, this paradox has primarily been examined with this cross-country methodology, opening up for other cultural differences to drive the results. For instance, measures developed in Protestant and Germanic-speaking countries, may not work the same in other cultural clusters of countries, and may not have the same statistical qualities there (e.g., in terms of reliability). Here, we reanalyze the results from multiple studies on the gender-equality paradox with country-level data available. We find that gender differences covary more strongly with cultural regions and data quality than gender equality, and that any variable higher in the West appears to achieve similar correlations as gender equality. Also, controlling for cultural regions consistently and strongly attenuates the association with gender equality, including to become statistically nonsignificant, or to switch direction. In other words, the baseline associations differ between and within cultural clusters (a Simpson's paradox), suggesting there is no simple causal relation between gender equality and expressed gender differences. Similarly, controlling for data quality indicators strongly attenuates the paradox. Finally, we show that, with and without controls, there is no consistent paradoxical association across many of the largest cross-cultural studies on gender differences, including newly analyzed data. The same is true for other country development variables considered in the gender-equality paradox literature.
多项跨国研究发现，西方国家存在更大的性别差异。最近，从进化的角度来看，有人认为平等可能会反常地加剧性别差异，因为它为男性和女性追求先天偏好提供了更多自由。然而，这一悖论主要是通过这种跨国方法进行研究的，这使得其他文化差异有可能影响研究结果。例如，在新教国家和说日耳曼语的国家制定的衡量标准，在其他文化集群的国家可能并不适用，在这些国家可能没有相同的统计质量（例如，在可靠性方面）。在此，我们利用现有的国家层面数据重新分析了多项关于性别平等悖论的研究结果。我们发现，与性别平等相比，性别差异与文化区域和数据质量的共变关系更强，而且在西方较高的任何变量似乎都能产生与性别平等相似的相关性。此外，持续且有力地控制文化区域会削弱与性别平等的关联，包括使其在统计上变得不显著，或者改变方向。换句话说，文化集群之间和内部的基线关联存在差异（辛普森悖论），这表明性别平等与所表达的性别差异之间不存在简单的因果关系。同样，控制数据质量指标也会有力地削弱这一悖论。最后，我们表明，无论是否进行控制，在许多关于性别差异的最大规模跨文化研究中，包括新分析的数据，都不存在一致的矛盾关联。性别平等悖论文献中考虑的其他国家发展变量也是如此。
