The Illusion of Gender Economic Equality: Misperceptions and Their Consequences for Support of Gender-Related Economic Policies

It is widely understood that economic resources are distributed unequally by gender. Yet how people perceive gender inequality in the United States, and the relationship between those perceptions and support for policies that could address it, remains unclear. Across three main studies (N = 1340) and two supplemental studies, we investigate (mis)perceptions of gender economic equality, their antecedents and consequences, and test whether correcting misperceptions increases support for gender equity-enhancing policies. Participants consistently overestimated contemporary gender equality (e.g., in 2022) and progress toward gender equality from 1973–2022 (Studies 1–3). Across eight timepoints from 1973–2022, nationally representative samples of participants in Studies 2 and 3 underestimated gender equality in the past and began to overestimate gender equality closer to the present, in a linear fashion. Both hostile sexism and belief in a just world consistently predicted overestimates of current gender economic equality (S1–S3). Overestimates of contemporary gender economic equality were associated with less support for policies meant to address gender inequality (S2–S3) and higher support for policies that promoted traditional gender roles (S3). In Study 3, we corrected participants’ estimates of contemporary gender economic equality and found that the more these participants had overestimated progress toward gender equality, the more they supported policies meant to address gender inequality after correction. We discuss the practical and theoretical implications of overestimating progress toward gender economic equality.