Emerging American Heterosexual Adults’ Reasoning about their Expectations for a Future Gendered Division of Labor

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Abstract

Prior scholarship has found that the newest generation of emerging adults tend to be supportive of gender equality in the home (Gere & Helwig, 2012; Scarborough, Sin, & Risman, 2019). Despite being egalitarian, however, American heterosexual emerging adults, particularly women, predict that their future household will involve men doing less chores and childcare than women (Askari et al., 2010; Dernberger & Pepin, 2019; Fetterolf & Eagly, 2011). Therefore, emerging adults’ gender egalitarian attitudes are not necessarily associated with an expected future egalitarian division. As a result, what factors contribute emerging adults’ gendered expectations for their future requires empirical investigation. The present study investigated 178 American heterosexual emerging adults’ (Mage= 20.56, SD = 1.19, 88.20% European-American, 51.12% cis women) expected future household labor distribution, their justifications for such expectations, and their gender attitudes.
Participants were recruited from a psychology subject pool at a university in the Northeast of the USA, during the Spring of 2020. Power analysis revealed our sample size was sufficient to capture a medium effect size ( f=.25). Participants completed an online survey with the following measures: Future expected Chore List (Askari et al., 2010; expected chores, α = .84, expected childcare, α = .92); open-ended question about why they expected the division (see Table 1 for coding scheme, coder reliability, κ = .84); ambivalent sexism inventory (asi; Glick & Fiske, 1996; α = .87); and ratings of agreement on a six-item scale on gender ideology (Gere & Helwig, 2012). We hypothesized that participants would be primarily egalitarian, but that there would be significant gender differences in expectations, attitudes, and reasoning. Finally, we also investigated whether in addition to attitudes, justifications would be associated with differences in expecting an equal division of labor in the future.
As hypothesized, according to t-tests on the center point of each scale, participants were on average egalitarian in their attitudes (See Table 2). Similarly, repeated-measures ANOVA revealed significant differences in justification usage, F(2, 335)=4.23, p=.01, ηp2 .02. As expected, Tukey’s Honestly Significant Difference (HSD) post hoc test revealed that equality justification was use more frequently than other justifications (See Table 2 for means). However, on average participants were not egalitarian (50%) in their expected involvement in household labor, t(177) = 7.10, p < .001, M = 56.24%, SD = 11.73. In particular, one-way ANOVAs revealed that women were more likely than men to not expect an egalitarian division, and to justify their expectations by referring to existing gender norms (See Table 2). Logistic regression with a broadly defined egalitarian division (40-60% = 1) as the dependent variable and gender (women = 1), social attitudes and justification use (x3) as independent variables, revealed that equality justification usage (OR = 7.41, 95% CI [2.50, 21.97], Z = 3.62, p < .001) and gender (OR = .18, 95% CI [.07, .41], Z = -4.07, p < .001), were positively predictive of expecting an egalitarian division. This study highlights the importance of investigating reasoning for understanding why (in)equity is expected despite gender egalitarian attitudes.

Authors

• Allegra Midgette, Texas A&M University - College Station
  Presenting Author

• Devon D'Andrea, Saint Joseph's University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Clare E Conry-Murray, Saint Joseph’s University
  Non-Presenting Author