To explore the effects of the gender gap and differences in residential location on environmental risk tolerance, we analyze data from the US general population and from households living with 50 miles of a US nuclear facility. We hypothesize that a potentially hazardous facility in close proximity to a residential community generates a constant risk signal that conditions and desensitizes that local population, causing the gender gap to converge and causing overall higher risk tolerance levels. We find support for this “context matters” hypothesis, i.e., that in environmentally stressed communities, the gender gap does converge, and males and females exhibit approximately equal levels of risk tolerance greater than those in non-stressed communities. We conclude that when modeling environmental risk tolerance both gender and place of residence should be considered potentially meaningful explanatory variables.
A gender gap is the difference between the attitudes, interests, or preferences of men and women in a given context. In this article, we explore the gender gap effect on environmental risk tolerance. In that context, the gender gap predicts that men will experience and report greater risk tolerance than women (Bord & O'Connor, 1997). However, when, instead of a general population sample, respondents are sampled in neighborhoods that may be considered “stressed” due to their proximity to a known potential environmental hazard, studies have found that the gender gap closes (Greenberg & Schneider, 1995).
Our focus, then, is how environmental risk tolerance is affected by two main factors: the gender gap and residential location. With respect to the former, Davidson and Freudenburg suggested that “[t]he study of environmental risk concerns… provides an important context for the quantitative analysis of the gender difference” (1996, at 305). To the latter, as recently as 2009, Baxter argued that risk is “best understood in the everyday contexts in which [it is] experienced and that place is an understudied, yet important, determinant of risk perception” ( Baxter, 2009, at 771 citing Masuda & Garvin (2006); italics in original). Davidson and Freudenburg further observed that while the “socialization process is often treated as a universal phenomenon… the assumptions underlying this formulation are culturally relative…” (1996, at 304–305). To that point, a more recent study suggested that in Sweden, where gender bias is relatively minor due to male/female equality in economic and social domains, the gap is not found ( Olofsson & Rashid, 2011a). These three considerations form the framework of our study.
Empirically, the gender gap is generally accepted in many contexts, particularly politics, general employment earnings and career advancement, and achievement in the worlds of science, mathematics, and technology. Our study of the gender gap in environmental risk tolerance, for both the general population and for residents of stressed communities, is motivated by published empirical challenges (e.g., Marshall, 2004) together with doubt as to the underlying theoretical explanation. To inform our analysis, we collected data from both the United States general population as well as from respondents living within 50 miles of a nuclear facility across the United States. In the survey instrument that provided our data, we embedded a question order experiment to permit us to manipulate the salience of adverse environmental events; this permitted us to experimentally test the gender gap effect on environmental risk tolerance. We were, then, able to analyze variations in the gender gap using both observed and experimental data across both the general population and among residents of stressed communities.
We first review and find in the environmental risk analysis literature a direct contradiction between Greenberg and Schneider (1995) and Marshall (2004). The crux of that contradiction is that under the former study, gender differences in risk tolerance found in the general population closed when the sample was drawn from stressed locations. Under the latter study, a gender difference in risk tolerance was not found in the general population, and equivocal support was found that in stressed communities men tolerated risks better than women.
Against that background, we hypothesize that the presence of a potentially hazardous facility in close proximity to a residential community generates a constant risk signal that conditions and desensitizes that population, effectively closing the gender gap. We continue by reviewing the literature on survey research question order and priming effects, detailing our sampling and data collection protocols, and discussing limitations attending our dataset. We then describe our hierarchical ordinal model and the statistical methodology by which we test our hypotheses, and detail our findings, which include a demonstration of the gender gap in environmental risk tolerance in the general population converging in samples drawn from stressed communities. We conclude with a confirmation of our findings that suggest that the convergence in stressed locations is a product of a persistent risk signal that overrides the culturally conditioned gender gap. We end by locating our findings in the context of recent studies from Sweden that explore a theoretical explanation for the gender gap.
