Gender and Inter-Ethnic Group Trust: Evidence from Romania

• In Event: Gender in Comparative Politics

Abstract

While there has been work on whether women are more trusting, the literature on out-group trust has generally overlooked the role of gender. In this paper, we call attention not only to the who is doing the trusting, but also how the gendered structure of languages matters, and what is the gender of the entrusted object. We argue people are more willing to have their sons – but not their daughters – marry someone of the out-group. This son-daughter difference, however, is less pronounced when the focus is on the gender-neutral child; when people use non-gendered languages; and when respondents are women. We test this using a survey experiment in Romania where we leverage the diversity in ethnicity and languages.

Authors

• Amy H. Liu, University of Texas at Austin

• Sarah Shair-Rosenfield, University of Essex

• Katy Smith, University of Texas at Austin