Gender Equality Paradox: A Robust Phenomenon,
Statistical Artifact or Wrong Framing?

The Gender Equality Paradox (GEP) refers to the counter-intuitive findings that men and women tend to be more different from each other in more affluent and gender-egalitarian societies. The paradox has been documented for basic human values (Schwartz and Rubel-Lifschitz 2009), a variety of personality traits (Schmitt et al. 2008; Mac Giolla and Kajonius 2019), preferences concerning time, risk, and social interactions (Falk and Hermle 2018), subjective well-being (Zuckerman et al. 2017), moral judgments (Atari et al. 2020), and aspirations for and choice of scientific, technical, engineering, and mathematical (STEM) educations and work (Charles 2017; Stoet and Geary 2018; Breda et al. 2020). The fact that gender differences tend to be more pronounced in countries, committed to promoting gender equality, is indeed paradoxical. However, there is still disagreement in the literature as to whether the paradox is a robust phenomenon and whether national gender-egalitarianism and gender differences in preferences and choices can be causally linked (Fors Connolly et al. 2020; Richardson et al. 2020; Marsh et al. 2021).