Gender and Environmental Concern: Insights from Recent Work and for Future Research

Research on environmental concern in the past few decades consistently finds that women express slightly greater environmental concern than men. This pattern is robust across samples, nations, time, and facets of environmental concern measured. In a recent suite of articles analyzing data from a few nationally representative data sets for the U.S. general public, we examine explanations for gender differences in environmental concern derived from gender socialization theory. We explain our key findings here, before providing five insights for supporting a comprehensive research agenda on gender and environmental concern. These range from specific suggestions on conceptual measurement and analytical techniques to more general ones for improving our social science data infrastructure.