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Understanding the importance of sexism in shaping climate denial and policy opposition

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Abstract

In the USA, a sizable share of the population denies the human causes of climate change and opposes policies to address it. System justification, where individuals fight to protect a socio-economic order, undergirds this opposition. We argue that sexism, representing an investment in gendered hierarchies, contributes to climate change denial and policy opposition. Using nationally representative surveys from 2016 to 2018, we show a consistent relationship between sexism and opposition to climate change beliefs and policies. These results are consistent across measures of both climate change beliefs and support for climate policy. We then show that sexism is correlated with climate denial and opposition to climate policy within a wide variety of subgroups of interest: for both Democrats and Republicans and for groups sorted by ideology, gender, education, and age. We then extend our analysis back in time, looking at data from 2012, finding similar effects prior to the 2016 election. The consistent findings point to the central role that system justifying beliefs about gender play in shaping attitudes about climate change in the USA.

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Data availability

All data is available freely for download from the original sources. Data and replication code are available from https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/EQ8PVR.

Notes

  1. Hostile sexists may see women as threats in male-dominated industries, and economic systems and modern sexists may reject changes to the status quo.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Constantine Boussalis, Rebecca Bromley-Trujillo, Nicholas Davis, Dan Hirschman, members of Amanda Bittner’s feminist writing group, and our reviewers at Climatic Change for their feedback and support in writing this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana, USA

    Salil Benegal

  2. Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

    Mirya R. Holman

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Both authors contributed equally to this work.

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Correspondence to Salil Benegal.

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Benegal, S., Holman, M.R. Understanding the importance of sexism in shaping climate denial and policy opposition. Climatic Change 167, 48 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03193-y

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