It once sounded like a surprising insight: in countries where gender equality is high, men and women would be more psychologically different. This so-called gender-equality paradox was often explained with an evolutionary sauce: if you give people freedom, their ‘innate preferences’ will prevail.

That idea has been widely adopted. You can find it in scientific articles, TED talks, documentaries, and YouTube videos with millions of views. And I confess, I helped spread it. But a new, thorough analysis by Berggren and Bergh takes a hard look at that explanation—and not gently.

Their analysis starts from a classic statistical problem: Simpson’s paradox. Simpson’s paradox is when a trend or relationship between two variables in a population disappears, or even reverses, when the population is divided into subgroups. What seems like a strong relationship at a global level disappears or reverses when you look at individual cultures. And that is precisely what happens with the idea that gender equality leads to greater gender differences.

Cultural regions (such as the Protestant West, Asia or Latin America) appear to be much better predictors of gender differences than gender equality. Countries culturally closer to each other show similar patterns, regardless of their ‘score’ on equality. In other words, it is not the degree of equality, but the cultural context that proves decisive.

And then there is something else: the quality of the data. Many questionnaires used were developed in English or Germanic contexts, and they are less reliable in other cultures. So if you measure differences between men and women with these tools, you are actually measuring how well these tools work in a certain culture. And these ‘differences’ become smaller the further you move away from the Western world.

The researchers even push the idea further by showing that you get equally good explanations if you look at any other characteristic that is typically Western. Like… strength of fictional medical conspiracies. If such nonsense variables predict as well as gender equality, then you know: something is fundamentally wrong here.

What does all this mean? We should be careful about making sweeping claims based on global averages. Berggren and Bergh’s study shows that many paradoxical findings relate to cultural differences and measurement problems. The popular evolutionary explanation – that gender equality reveals innate differences – does not appear robust in the data once you consider these factors. That does not mean it is an excluded explanation, but it raises more questions than it answers for now.

Abstract of the analysis :

Several cross-country examinations have found larger gender differences in Western countries. More recently, it has been argued, from an evolutionary standpoint, that equality may paradoxically increase gender differences, because it provides more freedom for men and women to pursue innate preferences. However, this paradox has primarily been examined with this cross-country methodology, opening up for other cultural differences to drive the results. For instance, measures developed in Protestant and Germanic-speaking countries, may not work the same in other cultural clusters of countries, and may not have the same statistical qualities there (eg, in terms of reliability). Here, we reanalyze the results from multiple studies on the gender-equality paradox with country-level data available. We find that gender differences covary more strongly with cultural regions and data quality than gender equality, and that any variable higher in the West appears to achieve similar correlations as gender equality. Also, controlling for cultural regions consistently and strongly attenuates the association with gender equality, including to become statistically nonsignificant, or to switch direction. In other words, the baseline associations differ between and within cultural clusters (a Simpson’s paradox), suggesting there is no simple causal relationship between gender equality and expressed gender differences. Likewise, controlling for data quality indicators strongly attenuates the paradox. Finally, we show that, with and without controls, there is no consistent paradoxical association across many of the largest cross-cultural studies on gender differences, including newly analyzed data. The same is true for other country development variables considered in the gender-equality paradox literature.