Influence of Attitudes about Gender on Desired and Actual Fertility in the Muslim World

• In Event: 386 - Regular Session. Sociology of Middle East and Muslim Societies

Abstract

There are two complementary trends in the research about the role religion and values play in fertility. On the one-hand, research seeks to explain differences in fertility between religious groups by comparing fertility outcomes, values, practices and the like. On the other hand, small-scale studies connect values to fertility within local communities, usually ethnographically or using local surveys. I seek to unify these two avenues of research by looking specifically at the effect of values on fertility outcomes with in the Muslim world, using quantitative data to explore broader trends. I focus on two specific aspects of gender attitudes: strict gender roles and the valuation or traditional religion in women. These are distinct but connected concepts. Data for this project were taken from the fourth wave of the World Values Study , including 25,745 cases in 10 different nation: Algeria, Bangladesh, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. there are four main findings from this research (1) among people over 45, those with conservative gender attitudes in the Middle East, South Asia and Turkey have larger families net of education, income and nation, (2) for people of all ages, conservative gender attitudes increase the ideal number of children across the Muslim world, (3) the relationship between gender attitudes and ideal family size is especially strong in Middle East, and (4) conservative gender roles increase the chances that a woman will have more children than she wants, but does not effect this mismatch for men.

Author

• S.M.C. Kelley, Yale University and International Survey Center