The current study investigates whether inclusive writing (IW), specifically full doublets (FD), that explicitly mention both masculine and feminine forms (e.g., les étudiants[masc.] et les étudiantes[fem.] | male students and female students), can reduce male-default bias in adolescents’ mental representations, and whether reading fluency or gender moderates this effect. One hundred and nine French-speaking adolescents (mean age = 12.1 years), with a broad range of reading abilities, produced lists of YouTubers and influencers under either masculine or FD instruction. Results from mixed-effects models revealed that FD significantly increased the proportion of female figures named, compared to the masculine condition, independently of reading fluency. Girls generated more female exemplars than boys, but there was no interaction with instruction type. These findings suggest that FD effectively reshape referential processing in adolescence, even for less fluent readers, by facilitating the activation of feminine exemplars in working memory and guiding referential resolution. Practically, this demonstrates that brief linguistic interventions can influence social cognition across diverse literacy profiles. Our study bridges developmental, social, and psycholinguistic perspectives, offering scalable, low-cost strategies to promote gender equity. Future work should compare FD with other inclusive formats and examine online processing costs (e.g., via eye-tracking) in educational contexts.

Family‐friendly practices in parliaments are central to the recruitment and retention of diverse representatives. Yet, instituting such reforms raises questions about public reactions, something little tested in current work. A conjoint experiment in the United Kingdom tests if the public punish MPs for taking time off their elected roles for a baby. And, importantly, asks who pays the price? Against expectations, MPs who take parental leave are not punished by the public. Voters prefer MPs who are parents, even when they take leave. Crucially, this preference is contingent upon MP sex. Women MPs who take parental leave are consistently the preferred choice over their male counterparts. When the ‘costs’ of parenthood are emphasised, women MPs receive a parenthood benefit, while men MPs do not. The findings align with the recent positive bias for women in electoral choice experiments and lend further support to implementing family‐friendly policies in politics.

Altmetrics are an emerging form of bibliometric measurement that capture the online dimension of scholarly exchange. Against the backdrop of both a higher education landscape increasingly focused on quantifying research productivity and impact, as well as literature emphasising the need to address gender bias in the discipline, we consider whether and how altmetrics (re)produce gendered dynamics in political science. Using a novel dataset on the Altmetric Attention Scores (AAS) of political science research, we investigate two questions: Do AAS vary by gender? And how do AAS relate to gendered social media dynamics? We find that AAS reproduce gendered dynamics found in disciplinary publication and citation practices. For example, journal articles authored exclusively by female scholars score 27% lower on average than exclusively male-authored outputs. However, men are also more likely to write articles with an AAS of zero. These patterns are shaped by the presence of high-scoring male “superstars” whose research attracts much online attention. Complementing existing scholarship, we show that the AAS closely overlaps with virality dynamics on Twitter. We suggest that these gendered dynamics may be hidden behind the seemingly neutral, technical character of altmetrics, which is worrisome where they are used to evaluate scholarship.

How does gender shape patterns of parliamentary speechmaking? We theorize and test three types of effects. The direct effect posits that female MPs speak less than their male peers. The access effect claims that the feminization of parliaments and parties is associated with higher gender bias in speech levels. The career effect foresees a greater gender bias in speech levels among MPs holding positions of power. Drawing on parliamentary speeches in South Africa (1999–2024), where high rates of female representation coexist with sexist norms and practices, we find evidence for all three effects. Female MPs make fewer speeches, and the growing feminization of institutions and the appointment of female MPs to leadership roles are not sufficient to reverse entrenched gender biases against women. Our findings highlight the need to go beyond the politics of presence and focus on the informal mechanisms that hinder women from performing their roles even when occupying positions of power.

Public attitude surveys provide invaluable insights into societal views on women’s rights, democracy and other critical issues. However, many research studies do not account for biases introduced by the gender of the interviewer, which can distort estimates of public opinion and key relationships among covariates of interest. This article examines gender-of-interviewer effects on public support for women’s rights to work, own and inherit land, as well as support for democracy and feelings of closeness to opposition (versus ruling) parties, using Afrobarometer data from 34 African countries. In line with prevailing conservative social norms in Africa, the analysis reveals significant gender-of-interviewer effects, with respondents reporting more gender-unequal attitudes when interviewed by male interviewers. Additionally, gender-of-interviewer effects appear in responses to questions on support for democracy and feelings of closeness to opposition (versus ruling) parties, with respondents more likely to voice pro-democratic attitudes and close affiliation with opposition parties to male interviewers, regardless of their own gender. These findings highlight the importance of accounting for such biases to ensure the validity of public opinion research and analyses based on these political variables.

Existing research often interprets the limited impact of candidate gender on vote choice as evidence of minimal gender bias in politics. However, this overlooks the dual role of candidate gender, as both a heuristic for substantive representation and a trigger for sexism in voter decision-making. These competing mechanisms can diminish the effects of each other, obscuring the true influence of gender bias in electoral behavior. Using conjoint experiments in South Korea, a context where gender issues are highly politicized and sexism remains widespread, we examine how candidate gender affects voter evaluations in low- and high-information environments. Our findings reveal that in low-information settings, candidate gender serves as a cue for substantive representation, leading to co-sex voting among women, while simultaneously activating hostile sexism among male voters, reducing support for female candidates. In high-information settings, explicit candidate policy positions diminish the reliance on gender cues but do not eliminate gender bias. Instead, sexism manifests through opposition to gender-equity policies rather than direct discrimination against female candidates. These results suggest that information environments shape the expression of gender bias, rather than eliminating it, offering a more nuanced understanding of the conditions under which candidate gender influences electoral preferences.

Oral argument is the most public and visible part of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision-making process. Yet what if some advocates are treated differently before the Court solely because of aspects of their identity? In this work, we leverage a causal inference framework to quantify the effect of an advocate’s gender on interruptions of advocates at both the Court-level and the justice-level. Examining nearly four decades of U.S. Supreme Court oral argument transcript data, we identify a clear and consistent gender effect that dwarfs other influences on justice interruption behavior, with female advocates interrupted more frequently than male advocates.

This essay highlights the impact of Politics & Gender on the discipline’s understanding of how gender shapes the preferences, behavior, and motivations of voters. It provides descriptive information about the prevalence of research on gender and voting in the journal, along with the proportion of articles dedicated to women voters across different regions globally. The bulk of the essay focuses on the substance of this research — drawing out major themes and identifying significant contributions within each theme — and it concludes by offering a future research agenda on gender and voting.

An unresolved aspect of women's underrepresentation in politics is the media portrayal of female candidates. This paper studies how advocacy campaigns may affect potential bias, leveraging the 2019 Swiss federal elections, which were shaped by two nation-wide, cross-party campaigns advocating for gender equality. The empirical analysis compares the 2015 and 2019 election campaigns, relying on an original dataset of the mentions that all candidates (over 3,700 respectively 4,600) received in over 2.2 million news articles. The analysis produces three main results. First, although in both elections male candidates received more media attention than female candidates did, the gender gap was significantly smaller in 2019 than in 2015. Second, in both elections, male and female candidates tended to be mentioned in conjunction with gender-stereotypical topics. Third, the gender gap in media attention before and after a key women's rights event was similar to that between the corresponding periods in 2015. These findings suggest that the differences observed between 2015 and 2019 are linked to the political campaign at large rather than to a specific event, despite its historical dimensions. The results contribute to the understanding of how advocacy campaigns can change bias in media coverage and, methodologically, to measuring and understanding gendered media coverage of politics.

This study empirically examines gender inequality in tolerance for women's opinions and identifies how the provision of normative gender-egalitarian message can mitigate this inequality by conducting online randomized experiments in Japan. In this experiment, I asked the participants to evaluate the agreement score for 10 anonymous statements and implemented two types of random interventions: disclosing the gender of the statement poster and providing normative statement for gender equality. The results of both cross-sectional and panel data analyses showed that people significantly reduced the agreement score for women's opinions compared with men's and non-gender disclosure opinions. Meanwhile, the negative impact of female gender disclosure was neutralized when participants were provided with a normative message.

To be effective, central bankers must project expertise and an anti-inflation commitment. However, those attributes are usually male-coded, which may undermine female central bankers. We assess gender bias using a survey experiment fielded in Japan in September 2022, when, for the first time in decades, the Bank of Japan appeared to struggle with inflation. We exposed individuals to simplified Bank of Japan communication and randomly assigned attribution to male (Mr. Adachi) or female (Ms. Nakagawa) Policy Board members. Respondents trusted the Bank of Japan less and were more sceptical of its capacity to handle inflation when Ms. Nakagawa represented it.

The number of studies examining gender differences in the social relationship rewards associated with costly religious practice has been surprisingly low. Here, we use data from 289 residents of an agricultural Tibetan village to assess whether individuals are more inclined to establish supportive relationships with religious individuals in general and to investigate the gender disparities in the relationship between religiosity and personal network characteristics. Our results reveal that participation in religious rituals contributes to the overall development of social support networks. The benefits to personal networks, however, seem to be contingent upon gender. For resource-intensive, infrequent religious rituals such as distant pilgrimages, males seem to benefit slightly more in terms of elevated in-degree values in their personal networks, despite similar levels of investment as females. In contrast, for daily, low-cost religious practices requiring ongoing participation, both genders obtain similar increases in in-degree values through regular engagement. It becomes more challenging for women to increase their status in communities when the effort invested in religious rituals yields smaller rewards compared with the same effort by men, contributing to ongoing gender inequality. These findings highlight the importance of examining the particular characteristics of religious rituals and the gender disparities in the associated rewards.

In the tale-within-tale ‘Cupid and Psyche’ narrated in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, the female heroine Psyche goes through a series of wanderings and tasks as punishments for seeing her husband Cupid's real form out of curiosity. Psyche's curiosity connects this internal tale with the external narratives in Metamorphoses, the protagonist of which, Lucius, shares a similar curiosity that leads to his downfall. While scholars attribute favourable qualities to Lucius’ curiosity despite its negative consequences, they deny the same value to Psyche's curiosity. In this paper, I argue against the condemnation of Psyche's curiosity due to the stereotype of transgressive females. Instead, I propose to view her curiosity as the drive for her awakening, empowerment, and growth, which transforms her into a fully powered agent and leads to her final reunion with Cupid in immortality.

The level of women’s parliamentary representation often increases after armed conflict, but do voters in postwar societies actually prefer female electoral candidates? We answer this question by analyzing a unique data set containing information on nearly 7,000 candidates running in three elections with preferential voting in postwar Croatia. Our analysis demonstrates that voters’ gender bias is conditional on the local electorate’s ideology and exposure to war violence, with voters of right-wing parties and voters in areas more affected by war violence being more biased against female candidates. These effects of ideology and exposure to war violence also exhibit a strong interactive relationship, suggesting that bias against women is strongest among right-wing voters in areas exposed to war violence and reversed among left-wing voters in areas exposed to war violence. Our findings highlight the need to better understand the relationship between gender, ideology, and violence in postconflict societies.