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Precarious manhood beliefs portray manhood, relative to womanhood, as a social status that is hard to earn, easy to lose, and proven via public action. Here, we present cross-cultural data on a brief measure of precarious manhood beliefs (the Precarious Manhood Beliefs scale [PMB]) that covaries meaningfully with other cross-culturally validated gender ideologies and with country-level indices of gender equality and human development. Using data from university samples in 62 countries across 13 world regions ( N = 33,417), we demonstrate: (1) the psychometric isomorphism of the PMB (i.e., its comparability in meaning and statistical properties across the individual and country levels); (2) the PMB’s distinctness from, and associations with, ambivalent sexism and ambivalence toward men; and (3) associations of the PMB with nation-level gender equality and human development. Findings are discussed in terms of their statistical and theoretical implications for understanding widely-held beliefs about the precariousness of the male gender role.

This article documents results of an ongoing 20-year, 6-wave longitudinal study of 201 German peace movement sympathizers, first surveyed in 1985 at an average age of 14½. The aim of the part of the study reported in this article is to predict current political involvement on the grounds of knowledge about earlier cognitive, emotional, and conative political involvement. Regression analyses show that it is not so much early engagement in political activities, like going to demonstrations, that let's one predict middle adulthood political mobilization but early cognitive and emotional involvement with politics, like being alarmed about ongoing stressful macrosocial conditions. With regard to cognitive involvement, factual knowledge about politics plays a more important role than early self-actualization values in the Inglehartian sense do. Altogether, approximately 12% of the variance in current political involvement of individuals in their mid-30s can be explained on the grounds of information about life circumstances and attitudes in adolescence.

Social role theory posits that binary gender gaps in agency and communion should be larger in less egalitarian countries, reflecting these countries’ more pronounced sex-based power divisions. Conversely, evolutionary and self-construal theorists suggest that gender gaps in agency and communion should be larger in more egalitarian countries, reflecting the greater autonomy support and flexible self-construction processes present in these countries. Using data from 62 countries ( N = 28,640), we examine binary gender gaps in agentic and communal self-views as a function of country-level objective gender equality (the Global Gender Gap Index) and subjective distributions of social power (the Power Distance Index). Findings show that in more egalitarian countries, gender gaps in agency are smaller and gender gaps in communality are larger. These patterns are driven primarily by cross-country differences in men’s self-views and by the Power Distance Index (PDI) more robustly than the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI). We consider possible causes and implications of these findings.

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