Facing Change Again: Meta-Analyses of Gender and Climate Change Attitudes Worldwide

Author

Affiliation

Frederick Solt

University of Iowa

Abstract

As the need to address climate change grows increasingly pressing, so does the need for understanding the factors that undermine public support for mitigation. One prominent recent analysis of three cross-national surveys argues that people—especially men—in richer countries express less concern for climate change and see more costs and fewer benefits to mitigation, pointing to compensation as a potential solution. Drawing on hundreds of surveys, this reassessment employs a series of meta-analyses to reveal that while gender differences in climate concern are indeed larger in richer countries, both men and women express more concern in such settings relative to poorer countries, and there is no relationship between economic development and gender differences in mitigation’s perceived costs and benefits. Instead, gender differences in climate concern are mirrored in differences in concern across a wide array of risks, consistent with more widespread masculine performative fearlessness in richer countries.

Important figures

Figure 1: In Richer Countries, Women Generally Express More Concern Than Men About Climate Change

BibTeX citation

@misc{Solt2025,
 author = {Solt, Frederick},
 title = {Facing Change Again: Meta-Analyses of Gender and Climate Change Attitudes Worldwide},
 publisher={SocArXiv},
 year={2025},
 month={July}, 
 doi = {https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/ka2tm_v1},
 url = {https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/ka2tm_v1}
}