The Green Gender Gap: Environmental attitudes and pro-environmental vote choice across Europe

Does gender matter for how we engage with green political ideas? Using more than twenty years of data across 36 European countries, this paper identifies a robust and persistent empirical regularity: women consistently express greater concern about climate and environmental issues than men. I refer to this empirical regularity as the Green Gender Gap. The gap is widespread across Europe and cannot be explained by gender differences in education, occupation, residential location, risk aversion, or left–right political ideology. The paper further examines whether this attitudinal gender gap translates into political behaviour. Looking at vote choice, I find that men in Northern and Western Europe are less likely to vote for green parties and less likely to vote for parties with a pro-environmental political agenda. However, in Southern and Central/Eastern Europe, there is no clear voting gap, despite women holding greener views than men. This suggests that the political outcomes of the Green Gender Gap are shaped by country-specific contexts, such as party-system characteristics, issue salience, and the availability of credible green political alternatives. In short, the Green Gender Gap is robust, widespread, and has real-world political consequences.