Stratified Masculinities: Multidimensional Social Class and Masculinities across Europe

• In Event: Race, Gender, and Class Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 6) Gender, Sexuality, and Masculinities

Abstract

Public discourse increasingly invokes a "crisis of masculinity" to explain political realignment and cultural backlash in Western societies. Gender scholars have long emphasized that masculinities are perpetually (re)constructed through social and material relations, with class playing a central structuring role (Connell, 1995). Yet quantitative research documenting how class stratifies masculinities across national contexts remains scarce, and both concepts are typically treated as unidimensional—obscuring the plurality of masculinity types and the potentially distinct effects of different class dimensions.
This study asks: how do multiple dimensions of social class—education, income, occupational position, and class origin—shape distinct configurations of masculinity among men across 24 European countries? We draw on two theoretical traditions: gender scholarship treating masculinity as a multidimensional configuration of attitudes, identities, and practices (Grunow et al., 2018; Knight & Brinton, 2017), and stratification research demonstrating that education, occupation, and income exert independent effects through distinct mechanisms (Bukodi & Goldthorpe, 2013; Hällsten & Thaning, 2022). We further test competing hypotheses regarding social mobility: whether upwardly mobile men over-conform to destination-class masculinity patterns (compensatory socialization) or retain origin-class dispositions (formative socialization).
Using European Social Survey Round 11 (2023) data, we measure masculinity through gender conformity scores, attitudes toward LGBTQ+ rights, and sexist attitudes. We estimate OLS models with all class dimensions entered simultaneously, extended with welfare regime interactions and mobility trajectory models. Results reveal that cultural and economic capital pull in opposite directions: tertiary-educated men score significantly lower on gender conformity, while higher income and occupational earnings potential are associated with greater conformity. This divergence underscores that class operates not as a unified axis of privilege or precarity, but as a multidimensional field generating contradictory pressures on masculine identity

Authors

• José David López Blanco, National University of Distance Education (UNED)

• Tomas Cano, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia