Women have been found to be more supportive of redistribution and social spending across established, Western, democracies. The size of these gender gaps varies across time and space, and yet, the comparative literature on attitudinal gender gaps has largely neglected the role of the political and policy context when it comes to accounting for this variation. In this paper, we test the role of welfare systems in creating or suppressing gender differences in attitudes towards redistribution and social spending. Welfare systems should be relevant for the size of attitudinal gender gaps because women’s greater preference for social spending and redistribution is linked to their greater use of welfare services, and so the extent to which these are currently provided should affect demand in a gendered way. Using survey data from the International Social Survey Programme 1985-2016 across European and Anglo-American democracies, we examine whether the welfare regime, spending in different policy areas, and the degree of maternity and childcare-related rights are associated with the size and direction of these attitudinal gender gaps. The extent to which the policy context matters for attitudinal gender gaps has implications for both preferences for state action in the population as well as for the types of gender vote gaps that we might expect to see across different welfare systems.