Intergenerational Transmission of Gender Attitudes: Evidence from India

Abstract

This paper examines the intergenerational transmission of gender attitudes in India, a setting where discrimination against women and girls is severe. We use survey data on gender attitudes (specifically, views about the appropriate roles and rights of women and girls) collected from adolescents attending 314 schools in the state of Haryana, and their parents. We find that when a parent holds a more discriminatory attitude, his or her child is about 15 to 20 percentage points more likely to hold the view. As a benchmark, classmates' average gender attitudes have a similar effect size. We find that mothers influence children's gender attitudes more than fathers do. Parental attitudes also affect their children's aspirations; girls with more discriminatory parents are less likely to want to continue their schooling beyond high school.

Information and Social Norms: Experimental Evidence on the Labor Market Aspirations of Saudi Women

“…Fernandez and Fogli, 2009;Jayachandran, 2019). Consistent with the idea of the inter-generational transmission of attitudes and norms (Dhar, Jain and Jayachandran, 2018a), we find that impacts are larger for female students whose mothers have worked in the past. These results are in line with both theory and existing evidence.…”

A Latent Class Analysis of Gender Attitudes and Their Associations with Intimate Partner Violence and Mental Health in the Democratic Republic of Congo

“…Families seem to be acting on these beliefs. Female enrollment in secondary school (ages [12][13][14][15][16][17] in the DRC has also steadily increased, with most recent figures indicating a female secondary enrollment rate increase from approximately 30% in 2010 to nearly 36% in 2015 [68]. Ongoing inquiry is needed to inform the development of future gender transformative programs designed to help communities confront the damaging consequences of gender inequality and IPV by discovering how to more effectively engage men and boys as agents of change [69].…”

“…Within a community, individuals may express an array of different attitudes toward gender and gender roles. Such attitudes are learned through a process of socialization that occurs within families, between peers, at workplaces, and through interactions with individuals and institutions at every level of one's social ecological environment [13,14]. Exposure to armed conflict and the widespread use of physical and sexual violence against both women and men is a critical life event that can profoundly impact both individuals' gender attitudes and the psychological health of whole communities [15].…”

Subjective returns to education: Rational expectations of disadvantaged groups in India

“…They had to answer whether they agreed or disagreed with each statement. Based on the study by Dhar et al (2018) that observed a positive correlation between parents' attitudes towards gender equality and their children's attitudes, we expected the girls whose parents support gender equality would have higher subjective earnings expectations across all three levels of education. Figure A3 in the Appendix shows in the y-axis the mean expected earnings for boys and girls.…”