Women and gender minorities, especially in lower-income countries, generally bear a greater burden than men do with regard to the impacts of climate change. For example, women are more often responsible for hauling water in drought-stricken areas, more often the targets of weather- and climate-driven violence, and more likely to find their education discontinued so they can work inside or outside the home, fulfill domestic tasks, or be married off to alleviate the cost to their birth families.
But just because they bear the brunt of climate burdens does not necessarily mean that they are more likely to think that climate change is human driven.
A recent analysis, published in World Development, showed that in countries with lower gross domestic product (GDP), greater access to education increased the percentage of women and gender minorities who think that climate change is driven by human activity. What’s more, in low-income countries with greater civil liberties, including a free media, people of all genders were more likely to think that human activity drives climate change.
“Having better knowledge on climate change increases propensity to be more engaged and build more resilience against climate change.”
“We have significant gender gaps in climate literacy in the developing world,” said Marija Verner, a climate communication researcher at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication in New Haven, Conn., and lead researcher on the study. “As countries are advancing both economically and democratically, these gender disparities in climate literacy, they shrink.”
“Having better knowledge on climate change increases propensity to be more engaged and build more resilience against climate change,” Verner said. “But it’s important to know that there are important gaps in foundational knowledge about climate change.”
Polling the World
Past research has shown that women and gender minorities generally express greater concern about climate change and its impacts and more readily recognize that climate change is driven by human activity.
However, most of this research has focused on women in high-income, developed countries with generally broad access to education. The lack of research in lower-income countries, especially those in the Global South, is due in part to the fact that research hubs are concentrated in higher-income countries, Verner said. What’s more, it’s typically easier to collect sociodemographic and opinion data in more developed areas than in less developed ones.
“This just speaks to our biases and access in academia.”
“This just speaks to our biases and access in academia,” Verner noted. However, “I’d say in the [past] 5 years or a decade or so, we’ve been getting more and more good public opinion data, especially about environmental attitudes or climate change, from the Global South.”
Verner and her team turned to social media to overcome these challenges. They developed a survey that asked people’s belief about the causes of climate change as well as demographic information about gender, age, education level, and how urbanized the area in which they live is. The team partnered with Meta to administer the survey to Facebook users in 103 lower-income countries and territories.
They received more than 92,000 responses, with an almost even split between men and women plus gender minorities and different age groups. Verner said that respondents skewed slightly toward those with more education and those living in urban environments, which is reflective of Facebook’s user base.
“It’s a trade-off,” she said, “because in this way, you can reach more people, it’s quicker, it’s more efficient, you have a bigger coverage.…But the con is that you are sacrificing an extent of representativeness.”
Gaps in Climate Literacy
People were asked “Assuming climate change is happening, do you think it is…” and were offered four options ranging from denial of climate change to some level of natural causation to acknowledgement of human causation.
The team found that countries with the smallest economies have the greatest gender gap in climate knowledge: More than 50% of men believed in anthropogenic climate change, while less than 40% of women and gender minorities did. This gender knowledge gap disappeared in higher-GDP countries, driven entirely by more women and gender minorities believing in anthropogenic climate change—men’s beliefs remained unchanged.
“When it comes to a well-established democracy that starts backsliding, oftentimes it starts with restricting media freedoms [and] academic freedoms.”
The researchers looked into potential causes for this trend and homed in on education level and metrics related to a country’s civil liberties, like the ability to choose a government, speak freely, and access free media.
The team’s data showed that for all genders, greater access to education and greater civil liberties increased a person’s belief in anthropogenic climate change. In more democratic countries and those with more educated populations, the climate knowledge gender gap disappeared or reversed, with more women than men believing in human-driven climate change.
The connection between democratic freedom, education, and climate literacy noted in this research could have broad implications, as political scholars have noted that many countries around the world have experienced democratic backsliding over the past 2 decades.
“When it comes to a well-established democracy that starts backsliding, oftentimes it starts with restricting media freedoms [and] academic freedoms,” Verner noted, pointing to both Hungary and the United States as examples. “You are getting less access to all sorts of things, including climate change knowledge.”
Making a Difference
“This paper provides a test and empirical evidence to support the importance of gender disparities in understanding about the anthropogenic causes of climate change in less developed country contexts,” said Jennifer Givens, an environmental sociologist at Utah State University in Logan who has studied the relationship between gender and climate literacy.
Givens, who was not involved in the new study, found its education finding to be useful “because as [the researchers] note, policies could be implemented to address this specifically, in addition to policies that target inequalities in education more generally.”
“Once women gain better understanding, will it lead to social change?”
Verner said that data like these could help international groups create education programs tailored for regions where the gender knowledge gap is particularly wide. Future work might seek to disaggregate the data and examine the gender gap country by country.
Data like these could be a useful starting point for policymakers and educators, but Givens questioned whether simply increasing women’s climate literacy would be enough to shift the needle, especially if they remain politically marginalized.
“Once women gain better understanding, will it lead to social change?” she asked. More research is needed, she said, to understand the effectiveness of potential climate awareness campaigns in lower-income and less democratic countries.
—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@astrokimcartier.bsky.social), Staff Writer
Citation: Cartier, K. M. S. (2025), Democracy and education increase women’s belief in climate change,
Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250485. Published on 23 December 2025.
Text © 2025. AGU.
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