Gender inequality and female political participation in Great Britain

This paper aims to study the rationale of women’ political participation in Great Britain. In particular, we focus on the impact of family orientations about gender inequalities as people’s attitudes can often predict behavior patterns; we also consider other factors related to gender issues, e.g. employment status, job satisfaction and household structure. Specifically, by using the British Household Panel Survey, we evaluate the impact of these determinants on the transition of women from a politically active life to the abandon of it. We use panel data methodology by considering both fixed and random effect models and discriminate among them by the Hausman test. We found evidence that gender inequality-oriented women have a higher probability to abandon an active support to a political party than others; while women who declare “neutrality” in gender equality opinions tends to become more likely to be not political engaged than gender equality-oriented women.