¿Los hombres son mejores líderes políticos que las mujeres?: un estudio comparado sobre los valores de género en política en Uruguay y Chile

Gender refers to the kind of behaviour that people expects about different persons according to their sex. Hence, it is a socially constructed and learned concept that defines what men and women should and should not do in the context of a defined time and society, and by means of socially shared rules. Using data from the World Values Survey, we analyse the changes that public opinion in Chile and Uruguay have gone through regarding gender values in the last decade. In particular, with respect to the participation of men and women in politics (do men make better political leaders than women?), investigating what are the factors that shape this attitude. We find that men, religious people, and Chile residents, present a lower probability of having egalitarian gender values. This probability increases with education, and the more on the left the person identifies himself in an ideological scale. We also find an increase in the average number of people that disagree with the statement: “men make better political leaders than women” in the period 1996-2006, but only in Uruguay.