Gender, the Welfare State, and Generational Changes in Gender Attitudes

• In Event: Poster Session: Women and Politics Research I

Abstract

This paper argues that generational changes in gender attitudes are a function of national social policies that affect families’ abilities to reconcile work and care. The feminist movement created a period of heightened salience of gender issues. This created a ‘feminist cohort’ of individuals born between 1945 and 1965 who hold strikingly egalitarian attitudes on measures related to women, work, and home life. However, as the salience of gender issues began to wane after the 1970s, traditional attitudes have reemerged. However, whether attitudinal differences exist across cohorts depends on two things: which dimension of gender attitudes questions measure and a country’s social policies towards women and families. Using factor analysis on a number of gender attitude questions, I derive three dimensions of gender attitudes: attitudes towards traditional roles, consequences of women’s employment, and women’s economic independence. Moreover, each dimension has a different theoretical relationship to social policies – for example, policies that depress women’s workforce participation have downstream consequences for how people view women in the workplace. I show that younger cohorts sometimes exhibit attitudes that are either no more egalitarian or more conservative than those expressed by the ‘feminist cohort.’ This paper uses the logic of welfare states and dimensionality of gender attitudes to explain variation across cohorts, thereby demonstrating the strong socializing effect of social policies.

In Liberal states, strong labor market activating policies mean increasingly egalitarian attitudes towards the consequences of women’s work, but more conservative attitudes towards traditional roles. In Continental states where policies disincentivize female workforce participation, attitudes towards women in the workplace have remained flat compared to older cohorts and less egalitarian than in any other welfare state. Paradoxically, these states exhibit more supportive attitudes towards women’s economic independence, perhaps reflecting women’s disadvantage in the labor market. On the other hand, Social Democratic countries continue to achieve higher levels of egalitarianism on all dimensions, and any stabilization in attitudes best approaches a ceiling effect.

Author

• Andreas Jozwiak, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill