For much of the political behavior literature, the gender gap in participation has appeared as a familiar fact: men participate more, women less, and the task is to explain why. Catherine Bolzendahl and Hilde Coffé’s Different and Unequal? makes this formulation less comfortable. The ‘gap’, they show, changes shape once political participation is disaggregated into distinct repertoires. Instead of asking whether women participate less than men, the book asks how gender differences vary across forms of political action and what those differences reveal about political participation itself.

This question is particularly timely because competing forces pull gender inequalities in different directions. Modernization theories would suggest declining inequalities as women gain education, labor force participation, and political representation. Yet democratic backsliding, populist politics, and anti-gender mobilization complicate expectations of linear progress. Against this background, the book examines participation types, individual resources and political attitudes, change over time, and national gender-equality contexts.

The empirical scope is unusually broad for such a concise Cambridge Elements publication. Drawing on ten waves of the European Social Survey (ESS) between 2002 and 2020, the authors analyze 26 European democracies and eight forms of participation: voting, petitioning, boycotting, demonstrating, contacting politicians, displaying campaign material, party work, and posting politically online. This disaggregation is substantive: it reveals repertoire-specific gender gaps, including reversals of the conventional pattern, and shifts attention toward explaining variation across political repertoires rather than a generalized female participation deficit.

The findings support the differentiation model. Women participate more in petitioning and boycotting, while voting shows little gender difference descriptively; men remain more active in contacting politicians and party work. Once political resources, especially interest and trust, are taken into account, women become marginally more likely to vote and more likely to display campaign material, while gaps in demonstrating and online posting disappear. The book’s title, Different and Unequal?, is well earned. Difference is not democratically innocent: even modest repertoire-specific gaps can produce unequal patterns of political participation.

One of the book’s major strengths is that it brings resource-based accounts of participation into conversation with feminist theories of gendered political behavior. Socioeconomic resources matter, but they do not fully account for the observed gender differences. Political resources, particularly political interest, help explain additional variation, although important differences remain across political repertoires. Even then, equalizing resources does not erase differentiation. The effects of resources differ by gender and sometimes reinforce existing repertoire patterns: political interest, for instance, further strengthens women’s relative engagement in petitioning and boycotting, while several institutional gaps remain male-dominated. This complicates accounts in which gender inequality is expected to recede once women acquire resources historically more available to men.

The book is also careful not to turn difference into essence. Bolzendahl and Coffé locate gendered repertoires in socialization, unequal opportunities, expectations surrounding care and public roles, and the different risks attached to political action. Conventional definitions of politics have historically privileged masculine forms of engagement, while more private, individual, or less resource-intensive activities have been comparatively overlooked. Treating femininity and masculinity as socially produced rather than fixed prevents observed gaps from being read back into supposedly natural differences between women and men – a welcome reflexivity in a literature where binary comparisons can too easily become reified.

The cross-national analysis shows that national context matters. Countries with greater overall gender equality generally exhibit higher levels of political participation among both women and men, while women’s political representation and economic equality can further strengthen women’s relative participation in activities in which they already participate as much as, or more than, men. The findings suggest that gender equality contributes not only to women’s political inclusion but also to the overall participatory capacity of democratic societies.

The discussion of measurement is particularly thoughtful. Political interest is one of the most consequential explanatory variables in the models, yet the authors question whether conventional measures capture it adequately. If respondents associate ‘politics’ primarily with national institutions, parties, and traditionally masculine issue domains, conventional measures may understate engagement with local concerns, children’s activities, education, peace, or environmental issues. The discussion extends to gender itself: the authors acknowledge that the ESS constrains them to binary categories and call for more nuanced measures of gender identity and internalized femininity and masculinity. More broadly, the discussion reminds readers that neither ‘gender’ nor ‘political participation’ is a theoretically neutral category.

The analysis also opens several promising directions for future research. The ESS provides exceptional comparative and temporal leverage but necessarily captures only part of the political repertoire, leaving less formal, community-based, care-oriented, movement-based, and crisis-driven forms of participation beyond its scope. These forms may follow different gendered patterns, including patterns that conventional survey measures are less well suited to capture. The book also invites future research beyond European democracies, particularly in contexts of authoritarianism, war, migration, non-citizenship, and exile, where both access to resources and the costs of participation are likely to reshape available political repertoires and gendered participation. Different and Unequal? is concise, rigorous, and highly teachable. It advances the study of gendered political participation by integrating resource-based explanations with feminist reflections on measurement, gender categories, and political repertoires. In doing so, it shifts attention from explaining a single gender gap to explaining how gender differences vary across political repertoires, contexts, and time.