Gender and Support for Climate Change Policies: The Case of Offshore Wind Farms

ABSTRACT Women express stronger environmental concern and more pro‐active climate change attitudes, but whether gender differences translate to gaps in policy preferences is less known. Attitude gaps might not map directly to policy preferences since other considerations and preferences will come into play when voters face the complexity of policy choices. We study this issue by exploring support for offshore wind projects, which involves making trade‐offs between different societal, economic, environmental, and climate change concerns. We conduct a conjoint experiment where respondents are forced to make these trade‐offs, thereby allowing us to examine whether gender gaps emerge when respondents make explicit choices. We find that despite substantive gender gaps in self‐reported attitudes, support for the most climate‐friendly attributes of projects are not systematically higher for women compared to men. Our results imply that one cannot necessarily make inferences about support for climate policies from gender differences in environmental attitudes and concerns. In addition, our findings suggest that gender identity operates in more complex ways than traditional binary categories suggest.