From Injustice to Solidarity: Linking Gender-Based Discrimination Experiences to Cross-Issue Political Engagement

While prior research links discrimination experiences to higher levels of political engagement among women, it remains unclear whether such engagement extends beyond in-group advocacy and how the nature of discriminatory experiences relates to this association. Drawing on survey data from Germany (N ≈ 1,800), this study examines how gender-based discrimination is associated with political engagement across four issue areas: women’s rights, anti-racism, labor rights, and environmentalism. The analysis identifies consistent positive relations between reported discrimination experiences and engagement across all domains, indicating that perceptions of gender injustice may be connected to broader forms of feminist consciousness and egalitarian orientations. Additional analyses show that this pattern holds primarily among women identifying on the political center or left, but not among those on the right. The results also point to issue-specific differences between overt and subtle forms of discrimination and underscore the particular salience of societal or everyday sexism for understanding patterns of political engagement.