Essays on Gender Inequalities

Women’s empowerment has been arguably a fundamental social change during the last century. The progress towards gender equality, the convergence in some of the life outcomes of women and men, and the changes in gender roles call for new approaches to research on gender. In this dissertation, I combine approaches from demography, social policy, sociology, and political science to propose new perspectives on various aspects of gender inequalities. I start with the most basic difference and ask if young women and men live in the same places. Then, I investigate how the progress towards gender equality has influenced political behaviour of women and men, and how political institutions have changed their approach to gender equality over the last 40 years. In the first empirical chapter, I document the extent to which migration shapes national and subnational sex ratios among young adults. I analyse population data covering almost all countries of the world. I find that most countries have either rural or urban skewed sex ratios among young adults. I also find a strong log-linear relationship between sex ratios and population density in European subnational regions. I show that sex ratios among young adults are usually skewed due to migration. In the second chapter, I study how local changes in relative social status of women and men influence voting behaviour. According to the social status threat hypothesis, men should feel threatened by the social changes and support right-wing populist candidates. I measure the changes in gender gaps in median income, college education, and labour force participation, as well as the share of women in managing positions in the last 15 years before Donald Trump’s election. I combine county-level census data, electoral data, and a large-sample political survey (Cooperative Election Study). Although Trump has gained more votes in places were women’s relative social status increased the most, I find no effect of the interaction between (male) gender and increasing relative social status. In the third chapter, I ask how men’s disadvantages are addressed within European Union’s gender equality policies. I adapt the framework of policy target populations to analyse all gender equality strategies and annual reports of the European Commission since 1982. In a qualitative and quantitative content analysis, I find that since mid 1990s, the Commission has included men as contributors to gender equality (‘problem solvers’). But men’s disadvantages in education and health were only addressed between 2006 and 2015. Later on, men’s problems have been essentially ignored, as they have been increasingly portrayed as a privileged group undeserving of European policies.