An Intersectional Approach to Students' Endorsement of Gender Equality using Multilevel Analysis of Individual Heterogeneity and Discriminatory Accuracy

Students' endorsement of gender equality is a crucial citizenship outcome. To protect democracy, future citizens must know about civic structures and respond thoughtfully to discrimination, such as racism or sexism (Kennedy, 2019). Furthermore, traditional gender attitudes can be associated with stereotypes about gender, implying evaluative representations such as “boys are violent”, creating evaluative responses (Zosuls, Martin, Ruble, Miller, Gaertner, England & Hill, 2011), risky behaviours (Varela et al., 2022), and affect the wellbeing and academic achievement of girls at schools (Nuamah, 2019).

However, regardless its importance, previous research on citizenship has not often been concerned with students’ attitudes towards gender equality (Isac, Sandoval-Hernández & Miranda, 2018). Research in this area tend to favour topics related with “engagement”, such as political or civic participation (Amnå, 2012; Ekman & Amnå, 2012; Miranda et al., 2020). Furthermore, attitudes toward gender equality are not often seen as an inequality outcome, but as a predictor of different forms of civic engagement .

Previous research has tried to identify how factors such as gender, socioeconomic status and education are related together to influence this outcome but using traditional analysis techniques such as interactions (Dotti Sani & Quaranta, 2017), carrying parsimony problems (Keller et al., 2022).

The present work has two objectives. First, frame the adhesion to attitudes toward gender equality as an inequality problem that could be understood under the approach of intersectionality. Therefore, testing whether the intersection of gender, immigrant status and socioeconomic background (parents’ education and home literacy) weakens the adhesion to these attitudes. Second, to adapt a method known as multilevel analysis of individual heterogeneity and discriminatory accuracy (MAIHDA), first developed to study intersectionality in health sciences (Merlo, 2018) to the area of citizenship attitudes.

MAIHDA approach uses intersectional social strata as second-level units, within a multilevel framework. Therefore, the membership of individuals in these clusters implies exposure to certain advantages and disadvantages (Evans, 2019). Thus, the intersectional multilevel analysis design incorporates power structures because the intersectional strata represent the level that conditions the distribution of resources and power in society (Merlo, 2018).
The data used is the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2016 (Schulz, Carstens, Losito & Fraillon, 2018), conducted by the IEA. For this research, two countries from Latin America were selected: Chile and Mexico.

The results indicate that social groups conformed of native women with a higher socioeconomic background (parents with university education and more literacy resources at home) tend to present the highest support for attitudes toward equality. In contrast, the social category that presents a lower level of adhesion corresponds to immigrant men students whose parents have a university education, with no literacy resources at home—followed by men immigrant students whose parents do not present university education and have from 11 to 100 books at home.

The conclusions discuss the strengths and weaknesses of this method and possible further applications of this method to other areas within civic education and education more broadly.