There is no end to speculation about what has driven the rise of the radical right over the past few years. Threaded through all the theories, however, is a single, agreed claim – that the far right is the domain of men. Angry white men populate media images. Scholars discuss men’s desire for strength, power, loyalty, belonging and the return to a romantic, pure and untroubled national past that can be restored through heroic male action. Policymakers report on uncertainty about jobs and rising unemployment as factors disproportionately affecting men.

However, there is reason to believe that male dominance of the far right is changing. Women play an increasing role in radical and far-right movements in ways that have largely been overlooked. Yet, as we argue in our recent book, Gender and the Radical and Extreme Right, attention to gender is critical for understanding the radical right.

Historically, women have represented a small minority of visible activists in radical-right movements and were assumed to play traditional supportive roles, with some exceptions. Kathleen Blee’s work on women’s roles in the Ku Klux Klan, for example, documents ways in which women were active participants in the early to mid-20th century, not only in the KKK itself but in groups such as the women’s auxiliaries of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund. Still, women have generally been disregarded as serious radical-right activists.

As far-right ideas and aesthetics have become more mainstream the stigma of participating in far-right movements has declined, encouraging women to join where they might previously have hesitated. While a “gender gap” in voting for radical-right parties remains, it is often overemphasised. An analysis of European Social Survey data in seven European countries showed that more than 40% of votes for the populist radical right come from women. Women are more visibly active in radical-right movements than ever before.

Some of the increase in women’s engagement in such parties and movements is the result of a shift in radical-right positions on gender and sexuality. While the far right has traditionally argued against same-sex marriage and has promoted women’s roles as wives and homemakers as part of “traditional” or “Christian” values, newer radical-right groups argue that western democratic traditions and values include supporting women’s rights, a wider range of sexualities, and tolerance toward the LGBT community.

This was most striking in the case of the Pim Fortuyn List in the Netherlands, but parties such as the Swedish Democrats and the Danish People’s party, while not explicitly seeking to protect gay and lesbian citizens, have also became more ambiguous on LGBT issues. This platform is used to draw a contrast with a perceived Islamic threat from increased migration to gay and lesbian rights, tolerance for sexual difference, and secular modernity. The strategy has attracted female voters to radical-right platforms.

Alternative for Germany leader Alice Weidel. Photograph: Filip Singer/EPA

The English Defence League (EDL) has also declared an openness to women and LGBT supporters. In the EDL, women remain a minority but mostly join on their own initiative, play an active role and share in the camaraderie of activism. Other far-right movements have also made deliberate strides to recruit women. Half of the Latvian National Front’s members are women, and it depicts women as spiritually superior to men, tasked with leadership and positioned as pioneers who safeguard the nation.

Elsewhere in Europe, women have assumed key leadership positions in far-right parties such as Germany’s Alternative for Germany and France’s National Rally. Women are also visibly violent in far-right movements. Last year, the German neo-Nazi terrorist Beate Zschäpe received a life sentence for her role in 10 murders, two bombings and other crimes.

Of course, there are still plenty of traditional gendered understandings at the core of modern far- and radical-right movements. This is clearest around the idea of women as wives and mothers who will reproduce white nations through childbirth and childrearing. Greece’s Golden Dawn depicts women as the reproductive engines of the nation who will mother future soldiers. It tells women to refrain from entering the workforce or public roles unless they are in positions aligned with their purportedly natural, feminine roles as nurturers at home.

Women who challenge these traditional norms pose a threat to the far right’s worldview. Rhetoric about women becoming “too powerful” has fuelled the far right’s attacks on changing social norms. In this sense, gender is crucial in triggering in many far-right men a discomfort with the world and desire for a return to some imagined simpler time. We see similar themes in the overlap online between far-right groups and the misogynistic “incel” movement, in which “involuntarily celibate” men’s sense of entitlement to women’s bodies has occasionally erupted in mass violence against women – most recently through the Tallahassee yoga studio shooting in Florida.

It is not only the regulation of women’s bodies that motivates the far right, but also their protection. Radical-right groups have mobilised female voters with anti-migrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric that is specifically tied to women’s rights, sexuality or assaults on women – using cases such as the 2015 New Year’s Eve attacks in Cologne to argue that increased migration will lead to more rape and violence against white women. The recent riots in Chemnitz, Germany, were sparked by the death of a Cuban-German man during a street fight with two asylum seekers. Less widely reported were unproven rumours that the fight started when the Cuban-German man defended a German woman from an attempted sexual assault.

Scholars, policymakers and the media have made great strides in understanding the role of masculinity in attracting men to far-right groups. But we have paid less attention to the potential for (re)framing femininity, women’s role in the nation, or discussions of women’s right to be used for recruitment or radicalisation by far-right political parties and movements. There is also scant discussion of the potential for women’s anger, their greater vulnerability during economic crises, or how the disproportionate impact of public service cutbacks on women is influencing their support for far-right politics.

Shifting dynamics around gender and sexuality as well as changing social norms around traditional notions of masculinity may also play a role in how radical- and extreme-right movements mobilise – whether by trying to regulate and protect women’s bodies or by using the language of gender and sexual rights to argue for anti-migration and anti-Islam platforms.

These developments suggest a need for a more nuanced understanding of gender in far-right movements. Without it, we are missing a big piece of the puzzle of why the radical right has proven appealing for so many people at this particular moment in history.

• Cynthia Miller-Idriss is professor of education and sociology at the American University in Washington DC. Hilary Pilkington is professor of sociology at Manchester University