World Society Integration and Gender Attitudes in Cross-National Context

Scholars of world society theory argue that integration in global society is important for shaping national outcomes related to gender relations, but past research has not examined how global society shapes individual gender attitudes. Additionally, past research on gender attitudes has not adequately considered contextual country-level determinants of these attitudes and has primarily focused on rich Western nations. In this article, I test hypotheses derived from world society theory about the relationship between country-level integration and individual gender attitudes using a broad sample of rich and developing nations. Using World Values Survey data from 64 countries, multilevel models of gender attitudes reveal that increased country-level ties to general and women’s INGOs are associated with more egalitarian individual gender attitudes. This pattern holds after accounting for relevant domestic factors, differences based on region and religious tradition, other social and political dimensions of globalization, and time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity between countries. I conclude by considering the theoretical implications of these results.