A first version of this paper was presented at the VI Conference of the European Sociological Association, Murcia, 23-26 September 2003.Over the last 20 years there have been several “newcomers” to the area of welfare studies. We may highlight here just three of them: the study of the Welfare State from a gender perspective; the comparative approach that gave birth to welfare models; and the study of welfare legitimacy, i.e. of the attitudes people have towards the Welfare State (WS). Although this paper fits into the last of those areas it also has some links with the other two. First, because rather than merely describing attitudes towards the WS, our objective here is to analyse to what extent men’s attitudes differ from those of women. Second, because in order to do so we will partially use a comparative methodology: We begin by looking at data from one particular country (Spain), and we move afterwards to the comparative arena presenting disaggregated attitudinal data (men’s and women’s answers to a set of questions about the WS) for 11 OCDE countries.Peer reviewed