Attitudes about gender-appropriate work and stereotypes about the aptitudes of women are thought to be a factor limiting women’s opportunities to gain access to top posts in government. This paper explores whether and when young people have gendered attitudes about women’s capacity to govern, employing an experimental research design. The experiment, conducted in Costa Rica in August 2014 with 700 high school seniors and first year university students, has a 2x2x2 factorial between groups design and replicates and then moves beyond Matland’s (1994) study of youths’ gender attitudes in Norway. Costa Rica was selected for this study because, while both countries are small with unitary forms of government and long established democratic regimes, Costa Rica has pursued a “fast track” to incorporation of women with successful gender quotas, while Norway followed the “incremental” track. The treatment is a 500 word speech preceded by a short biography paragraph of the candidate to reinforce the candidate sex treatment (speeches and biographies are identical for the woman and man candidates of the same party). Participants were randomly assigned to a treatment and after reading the speech they answered a survey to assess if there are gendered attitudes about capacity to govern, including general assessment and evaluations in 12 specific policy areas. Preliminary findings indicate that subjects do distinguish candidates on the basis of candidate sex, but in contrast to Matland’s study of Norway, Costa Rican students evaluate the woman candidate more favorably than the man. This finding holds across political parties, family SES, subject sex, and type of school. Additional analysis will explore if sex role attitudes predict assessments of women’s capacity to govern.
