Many authors argue that levels of childlessness and fertility are a function of changing gender relations, but the mechanisms behind this association remain unclear and mainly untested. This study argues that the societal variation in gender role attitudes explains the link: a great variation in attitudes among potential partners leads to uncertainty and conflicts, which depresses people's propensity for parenthood. This idea is tested with multilevel logistic regression models for 6305 individuals in 38 countries on all continents, using ISSP 2012 data. Measures for the average gender role attitude in the society as well as the dispersion in attitudes are regressed on whether individuals have at least one child or are childless. Attitudes are captured using factor analysis and are opinions towards the gendered division of given tasks and privileges, such as childrearing or the uptake of parental leave. The dispersion in attitudes is the standard deviation of the factor variable in the given country. The analysis gives support to the hypothesis: the greater the variation in gender role attitudes, the higher the chance for individuals to remain childless. The association is significant and holds against various robustness checks.
Cycling is an environmentally sustainable social practice that contributes to liveable cities and provides affordable and healthy transport. People with lower education could particularly benefit from cycling, as they tend to fare worse regarding finances and health. However, in bivariate analyses, those with lower education cycle less. This article discusses the social meaning of cycling and investigates whether the education–cycling association holds after accounting for (1) confounders and (2) factors that determine decision leeway between different transport modes. I analyse approximately 80,000 short-distance trips (0.5–7.5 km) reported by 28,000 working-age individuals from cities in Germany using multilevel linear probability regression models. Results support that higher education systematically and substantially increases the propensity to cycle. This education gap implies major untapped potential for environmental sustainability, that current pro-cycling policies in cities disproportionally favour the highly educated and that cycling patterns contribute to inequalities in finances and health.
This paper tests whether couples in which partners hold dissimilar gender role attitudes are less likely to have a first child together compared to couples in which both partners share similar attitudes. The study contributes to micro-level research on gender role attitudes and fertility, which has examined the content of one partner’s attitudes, but not the fit of both partners’ views. We analyse unique panel data from the German Family Panel (pairfam) collected between 2008 and 2017, which includes information on the attitudes of both partners in a couple. Results show that couples whose members have dissimilar gender role attitudes are substantially and significantly less likely to have a child together over time. This observation holds independently of both partners’ individual attitudes and holds against a number of robustness checks.
Previous research has shown that gender role attitudes can predict changes in couples’ housework division over critical life events, but these studies might have suffered from endogeneity because such life events are anticipated and may be affected by gender role attitudes. In contrast, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic was a truly exogenous shock that hit couples unexpectedly. Estimating fixed-effects regression models, the authors examine the role of gender ideologies in how couples adjusted their division of housework during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 compared with a prepandemic baseline observation. The data cover 3,219 couples from the UK Household Longitudinal Study. Both partners spent substantially more time on housework throughout the COVID-19 crisis than before, especially in the early stages. However, we found no evidence that individuals’ or couples’ precrisis gender role attitudes affected changes in men’s and women’s absolute or relative contributions to housework at any time during the lockdown.
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