Across countries, a gender gap exists with respect to attitudes toward leadership and political participation, with women scoring lower than men on measures of these outcomes. This gap emerges early in life and could be influenced by gender norms learned through socialization, in the family or at school. Using a natural experiment in high school assignment in South Korea, we examine whether an all-female school environment can contribute to narrowing the gender gap by increasing women’s civic and political participation and fostering their ambition for leadership. We find that female graduates of single-sex schools are more engaged in politics and society and more likely to pursue leadership positions compared to women who graduated from coeducational schools. These effects are durable, lasting for years, even decades. However, single-sex schools do not cultivate more progressive gender attitudes among women, so increased female participation need not imply greater activism for gender equality.

When forming opinions, mass publics may implicitly or explicitly value some people’s well-being more than others. Here we examine how two forms of this phenomenon—ethnocentric valuation and moral exclusion—affect attitudes toward international trade. We hypothesize that attitudes toward competition and believing that trade is a competition moderate the extent of ethnocentric valuation and moral exclusion; although all citizens value their co-nationals’ livelihoods systematically more than those of people in trading partner countries, greater ethnocentric valuation and moral exclusion occur when trade is seen as a competition and when individuals hold more positive attitudes toward competition.

Using two survey experiments conducted on representative samples of both Americans and Canadians, we examine how differential valuation of in-country and out-country job gains and losses influences trade policy preferences. We test a series of hypotheses using multiple variables tied to competitive attitudes across two countries that differ in their attitudes toward competition.