Abstract

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, previous research on citizenship is not often concerned with this affective behavioural aspect (Isac, Sandoval-Hernández & Miranda, 2018), focusing instead on more “engagement” dimensions, such as political or civic participation (Amnå, 2012; Ekman & Amnå, 2012; Miranda et al., 2020). Besides, attitudes toward gender equality are not often seen as an outcome of inequality. 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, understanding how the intersection of gender, immigrant status, and socioeconomic background (parents’ education and home literacy) can make the lack of adherence to these attitudes more pronounced. Second, the MAIHDA framework from the achievement educational field (Keller et al., n.d.) will be replicated in the area of citizenship attitudes. MAIHDA approach uses intersectional social strata as second-level units. Therefore, the membership of individuals in these clusters implies exposure to certain advantages and disadvantages (Evans, 2019). Thus, the intersectional multilevel analysis design adopts 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, the case of Chile was selected. The results indicate that social groups consisting 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 male students whose parents have a university education, with no literacy resources at home—followed by male immigrant students whose parents do not have a university education and have from 11 to 100 books at home. Conclusions address the strengths and weaknesses of this method and possible further research in the field.