by Ruby Amanda Oboro-Offerie, PhD Student, Department of Sociology
Public trust in institutions has long been a focus of social science research, yet most studies have concentrated on political institutions (Van Der Meer 2010), banks (Fungáčová et al. 2019), and regional (Ron and Crow 2015) and international organizations (Torgler 2008; Hessami 2011). In contrast, limited attention has been paid to trust in women’s organizations (e.g., women’s rights/empowerment groups or feminist movements), despite their growing role in civil society, global gender advocacy, and transforming social norms and gender power relations (Hassim 2006).
The inquiry into trust in women’s organizations intersects with broader debates on global feminism and the contested terrain of contemporary feminist mobilization. While feminist NGOs and women’s movements have gained traction across diverse contexts, they also face mounting resistance. In the Global North, right-wing populists and anti-gender critics frame feminist advocacy as a threat to traditional values (Epstein 2001; Khan et al. 2024). In parts of the Global South, feminist actors confront cultural and religious tensions, with scepticism often intensified by their reliance on international funding (Jad 2004). In effect, scholars argue that feminist organizations in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East, especially during the UN Decade for Women and the Beijing Conference, have adopted global repertoires that spurred transnational proliferation (Freedman 2007; Alvarez 2000; Ferree and Tripp 2006). These shared commitments are reflected in the structure and rhetoric of women’s NGOs from Nairobi to New York, facilitating inter-organizational trust (Çagatay et al. 1986).
Yet scholars caution against assuming that the global diffusion of feminist norms automatically fosters local legitimacy or trust. The coexistence of expanding feminist networks and political backlash highlights the need to examine trust in women’s organizations within this dynamic and contested landscape. Along these lines, my study merges for analysis data from the World Values Survey with GDP data from the World Bank and overall democracy from the Varieties of Democracy data.
Based on data from the World Values Survey Wave 7 (2017-2022), trust levels vary considerably, with mean scores ranging from approximately 2.1 to 3.0 on a four-point scale, where higher values indicate greater trust. The top fifteen countries exhibiting the highest levels of trust include Myanmar, Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Uruguay, Puerto Rico, China, Tajikistan, Malaysia, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom, Zimbabwe, Thailand, Ethiopia, and Taiwan. In contrast, the lowest levels of trust are observed in Egypt, Libya, Lebanon, Iraq, Serbia, Tunisia, Guatemala, Morocco, Romania, and Armenia. A cluster of countries including Mongolia, Ukraine, Greece, Jordan, Peru, Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, Japan, and Russia display midrange levels of trust.
These patterns suggest that trust in women’s organizations is not uniformly distributed globally, indicating that high levels of trust are not confined to a specific region or economic status; both developing and developed countries appear among the highest and lowest trusters. This heterogeneity highlights the need to further examine how individual and broader national, historical, political, and cultural contexts rather than simple economic development shape public perceptions of women’s organizations across countries.
To further explain the observed variation among individuals nested in the various countries, I estimate the role of individual and broader national characteristics in shaping trust in women’s organizations using a multilevel framework. At the individual level, I find that, on average, women exhibit significantly higher trust in women’s organizations than men, though the magnitude of this gender gap varies considerably across countries. This outcome is conditional on holding constant factors such as trust in philanthropic organizations (charity and environmental), government institutions (parliament, court, police, political parties, etc.), international organizations (NATO, WTO, WHO, ICC, etc.), media organizations (television and press), age, educational attainment, religious affiliation, residence, and employment status.
At the broader national level, my analysis found that Human Development Index (HDI) and GDP per capita are not significantly associated with trust in women’s organizations, and the quality of democracy exhibits only a marginal effect. These results challenge the prevailing assumption in institutional trust scholarship that structural conditions—such as economic development, human capital, and democratic governance—consistently predict trust across all domains. While such macro-level indicators have proven useful in explaining trust in political, state, economic, and media institutions, their limited explanatory power in this context suggests that trust in women’s organizations follows a distinct trajectory given its unique role.
In this context, findings obtained from my study lend empirical weight to theoretical arguments from transnational feminist scholarship, which conceptualize trust as a relational and ideologically mediated process. In particular, higher levels of trust among women across countries support the notion that trust in women’s organizations reflects both gendered socialization and alignment with globally circulating feminist repertoires. However, the variation in the size of the gender gap and the contextual moderation of trust effects further show that this trust is not universally constituted. Rather, trust emerges through the interplay of shared feminist commitments and their local negotiation, shaped by histories, organizational forms, and the perceived legitimacy of transnational agendas. These findings advance advocacy strategies by demonstrating that trust in women’s organizations is not merely a function of structural endowments but is transnationally constituted, relationally enacted, and contextually differentiated.
—Ruby Oboro-Offerie received a 2024 Graduate Student Research Grant for this project.
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