Sex Differences in Attitudes toward Nuclear War

Abstract

This research considers the enduring, cross-cultural belief that women oppose war more than men do and seeks to disentangle it from competing explanations of anti-war attitudes. Focusing on correlates of pessimism and optimism about the imminence and survivability of nuclear war, support is found for hypotheses concerning psychic numbing, attenuated future plans, and political orientations, but not for hypotheses concerning hedonism and various demographic and background characteristics. The strongest finding is that women are significantly and substantially more pessimistic in their nuclear war attitudes than men, and this finding cannot be `explained away' statistically by the host of other variables considered in the analysis. Explanations of sex differences which refer to innate or socialized characteristics of women and men cannot be ruled out because data for direct tests are unavailable. But such explanations rely on women's unique childbearing capacity, and our best indicator of it - childbearing plans - is associated with nuclear war attitudes similarly for men as for women. A structural explanation of sex differences is offered; its advantages include greater promise for social change and parallels to other anti-war phenomena. An extensive literature review is included. Data come from sample surveys of university students in 1985 and 1987.