Forthcoming **at Political Behavior
Abstract
Youth is a critical period where future citizens can develop both gender stereotypes and sympathy for gender out-groups. In this article, I draw attention to an under-studied aspect of youth socialization, gender compositions of peer environments, and theorize that it influences stereotyping of women in political roles as well as political sympathy for gender out-groups. To test this theory, I use a natural experiment in Korea: the quasi-random assignment of students to co-ed and single-gender secondary schools. Collaborating with a provincial office of education, I field an original survey of adolescents in this setting and obtain comprehensive records of school assignment processes to calculate each respondent’ probability to be assigned to either type of school. Controlling for this with inverse propensity score weighting, I show that adolescents assigned to mixed-gender environments express higher support for policies that imply sympathy with gender out-groups, but also exhibit more intense socialization to gender stereotypes with larger gender gaps in political engagement and a stronger tendency to use gender labels when evaluating politicians. Together, these results suggest mixed-gender environments can lead to sympathetic but stereotyping political attitudes regarding gender, while single-gender environments can produce less sympathetic but less stereotyping gender-related political attitudes. This demonstrates that gender stereotyping of women in political roles and sympathy towards gender out-groups are distinct dimensions of political attitudes, and there can be trade-offs between them in the effects of a socialization environment.