Klaus Desmet’s research has been featured recently in both a VoxEU column and a VoxTalk podcast! The basic question Klaus and his co-authors investigate is whether women and men more similar in their preferences in more gender-equal societies.
What do they find when using information on the shares of male and female Facebook users that are interested in over 45,000 different topics? For interests that are systematically biased toward the same gender across the globe (soccer, videogames, children, romance novels, …), differences between men and women are larger in more gender-equal countries, whereas the opposite is true for interests that do not display a systematic gender bias (travel, fitness, …). These contrasting results are consistent with both evolutionary psychology and social role theory.
You can read the full working paper here.