Conservative Views and the Effect of Gender Gaps (Case Study: Students of University of Isfahan)

Investigations and studies in 1960’s and 1970’s indicate that in some political, cultural, and economic issues, as well as party identity, men think differently from women so that women have relatively strong conservative tendencies, but new findings indicate that since 1980’s women’s degree of conservatism has degreased. The main objective of the present study is to investigate the existence or inexistence of such differences among groups of women and men in the studied population. To do so, the research population includes all students of universities of in Isfahan City. From among them, 914 participants were selected using the cluster sampling method. The results of this research indicate that women in cultural and political domains are more conservative than men. But in economic issues, men supported free markets and privatizing the economy more than women. This issue indicates that women have less economic conservative tendencies than men do. In addition, investigating findings more closely shows that the effect size between the gender variable and conservative components are moderate only in terms of cultural conservatism, and in the rest of hypotheses, the effect size was small. Therefore, it can be concluded that except for cultural domains in which there are relatively profound gaps among men and women, in other domains of the society, these gender gaps have been relatively degreasing and fading.