UC Santa Barbara

Achieving gender equality fundamentally requires a transfer of power from men to women. Yet data on mens support for womens empowerment (WE) remains scant and limited by reliance on self-report methodologies. Here, we examine mens support for WE as a sexual conflict trait, both via direct surveys (n = 590) and indirectly by asking mens wives (n = 317) to speculate on their husbands views. Data come from a semi-urban community in Mwanza, Tanzania. Consistent with reduced resource competition and increased exposure to relatively egalitarian gender norms, higher socioeconomic status predicted greater support for WE. However, potential demographic indicators of sexual conflict (high fertility, polygyny, large spousal age gap) were largely unrelated to mens support for WE. Contrasting self- and wife-reported measures suggests that men frequently exaggerate their support for women in self-reported attitudes. Discrepancies were especially pronounced among men claiming the highest support for WE, but smallest among men who held a professional occupation and whose wife participated in wage labour, indicating that these factors predict genuine support for WE. We discuss the implications of these results for our understanding of both individual variation and patriarchal gender norms, emphasising the benefits of greater exchange between the evolutionary human sciences and global health research on these themes.