Institutional Gateways and Educational Agency in Global Gender Attitudes

At similar levels of development, societies differ sharply in gender-egalitarian attitudes. This article argues that modernization does not automatically translate resources into equality: institutionalized gender inequality acts as a gateway that filters value change. Using harmonized gender-attitude items from the World Values Survey and International Social Survey Programme Gender Roles modules, I construct two cross-nationally comparable dimensions—equality in power and status and role essentialism—and analyze 360,000 respondents in 95 countries from 1981 to 2022 with weighted three-level models. Institutionalized gender inequality suppresses egalitarian attitudes on both dimensions, more strongly for public power and status than household roles, and structural cross-national differences matter more than year-to-year shifts. Education functions as an especially protective buffer for public-sphere judgments. Decomposing aggregate indices into thematic indicators links political empowerment and representation to power/status equality and labor and care arrangements to role norms, refining modernization and structural accounts of cultural backlash.