Gender‐Role Ideology, Labor Market Institutions, and Post‐industrial Fertility

Abstract

Fertility rates below population replacement level now characterize a broad swath of post-industrial societies, especially in Southern Europe and East Asia. This article offers a theoretical framework that gives primacy to the role of gender-essentialist norms and institutional variation in labor markets to explain variation in total fertility rates across 24 OECD countries over the past two decades. We demonstrate the variation in gender-role ideologies that characterize postindustrial countries and show how these country-level patterns interact with measures of labor market protection and the economic situation of young adult males to influence variation in TFRs. We provide evidence that interaction between gender-role ideologies and labor market institutions that reinforces men's role as breadwinners and women's role as caregivers (what we term gender-essentialist norms) is negatively related to post-industrial fertility.

Navigating between two cultures: Immigrants' gender attitudes toward working women

“…Another limitation of this study is that it is restricted to only one dimension of gender-egalitarian attitudes, namely attitudes toward women’s employment. We recognize the multi-dimensionality of gender ideology and, therefore, cannot generalize our findings to other dimensions of gender ideology (Brinton & Lee, 2016; Knight & Brinton, 2017). Nevertheless, the advantage of focusing on this unique dimension of gender ideology is that it can be measured with the same survey instrument both at the destination- and origin-levels.…”

Babies, Work, or Both? Highly Educated Women’s Employment and Fertility in East Asia

“…A recent analysis of gender-role attitudes in 24 OECD countries shows that in Japan and Korea, larger percentages of the population than in other countries believe in a "prowork conservative" model of women's lives. This ideology sees women's primary role as being in the household, to be supplemented by their role in the workplace (Brinton and Lee 2016).…”

Postindustrial Fertility Ideals, Intentions, and Gender Inequality: A Comparative Qualitative Analysis

“…This may be because the influence of the macro-level normative, institutional, and policy context of gender relations on micro-level dynamics is not consistently articulated in these studies, despite McDonald's theoretical emphasis on the macro-level context. Macro-level theoretical and empirical work, on the other hand, has focused on how the interplay between gender-role ideology and the institutions that either encourage or deter greater role-sharing between the sexes affects a country's birth rate (Brinton and Lee 2016;Esping-Andersen and Billari 2015;Esping-Andersen, Arpino, and Baizán 2013;Goldscheider, Bernhardt, and Lappegård 2015;Mills 2010).…”