Does advancing women’s empowerment lead to perceptions of threat?

Does advancing women’s empowerment lead to perceptions of threat? Research on who is threatened by women’s empowerment, under what conditions and why. The advancement of women into positions of power is a key priority of many countries, corporations, and leading international organizations (see, for example, the European Commission 2020; United Nations 2022). However, while most people in Europe express recognize the benefits and support for greater parity among the sexes (Pew Research 2019), the changes in society brought about by greater parity among men and women are viewed as threatening by others, resulting in a backlash among some (Verloo 2018). The backlash, if organized politically, has been shown to result in the stagnation or even decline of gender equality in several EU countries. Yet, scholars disagree on which groups oppose the advancement of women, when and why, thus presenting an important gap in the research field which we explore in further detail in this project.