Gendered environmentalism and public trust: a multilevel analysis of gender gaps in trust in environmental protection movements

Amid intensifying climate crises and the politicization of environmental issues, cross-national evidence on self-reported trust in environmental protection movements remains scarce. Scholarship on the gendered politics of social movements shows that women are often cast as pro-environmental and symbolic actors in environmental justice, frequently mobilized through frames of care and anti-violence. Yet whether framing translates into patterns of trust in the civic actors leading environmental advocacy is unclear. This study addresses the gap by centering environmental protection movements within institutional-trust research and analyzing how gender shapes trust alongside national conditions (GDP per capita and carbon emissions). Using five waves of the World Values Survey from 89 countries, 175 country-waves, and 127,967 respondents, multilevel models show that women report higher trust than men, with small magnitude effects across countries. These findings extend institutional-trust research, illustrating how gendered contexts in social movements activism shape complex interactions within global environmental protection advocacy. Additionally, taken-for-granted magnitude effects on assumptions about the relationship between feminization of environmental activism, behaviours and participation need to be reconsidered.