Men's childbearing desires and views of the male role in Europe at the dawn of the 21st century

Abstract

The development of modern family patterns of the past decades has been accompanied by substantial changes in social norms, values and gender relations. There is theoretical support for the assumption that the persistence of low fertility levels across Europe is likely to be linked to the incomplete gender revolution, more specifically to the lack of, or only limited changes in the male gender role as opposed to the women's role. In order to have a deeper understanding of the development of fertility, we aim to shed more light on the impact of men's role orientation on their fertility intentions in this study. Our analyses include men aged 20-44 years in eight countries: Austria, Estonia, East Germany, West Germany, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Poland. The data are extracted from the Population Policy Acceptance Study of the early 2000s. Examining within-country differences, we find that men with egalitarian attitudes seem to have higher fertility aspirations than their traditional counterparts in contemporary Europe. This is supported by both the descriptive and the multivariate analyses. The picture is somewhat less conclusive though when we focus on country-rankings by intended family size and by the prevalence of egalitarian versus traditional attitudes.

The New Roles of Men and Women and Implications for Families and Societies

“…Both conceptual frameworks highlight the relevance of the transformation of gender roles outside and within the family, in line with McDonald's views on the importance of gender equality and gender equity for fertility change (McDonald 2000(McDonald , 2006. In addition, they call for attention to men's situation, which until relatively recently has been quite neglected (for exceptions see Goldscheider and Kaufman 1996;Puur et al 2008;Goldscheider et al 2010), even though the decline in male wages and men's labour force activity along with growing labour market uncertainty have been recognized Booth et al 1999;Mills et al 2005).…”

“…The new family trends and patterns have been paralleled by changes in gender roles, especially an expansion of the female role to an economic provider for a family, and lately also transformation of men's role with more extensive involvement in family responsibilities, mainly care for children. In contemporary family scholarship there is an increasing awareness of gender and family changes being interconnected, and conceptualization of the gender revolution has gained terrain (Goldscheider 1990;Puur et al 2008;Esping-Andersen 2009;England 2010). Developments related to women's new role are seen as weakening the family and have been attributed to the first phase of the gender revolution, while more recent family changes and the emerging caring male role have been linked to the second phase (Goldscheider et al 2015).…”

Future Fertility in Low Fertility Countries

“…Some studies suggest that men's more gender-egalitarian roles result in higher fertility (Kaufman 2000;Puur et al 2008), while others find the opposite (Westoff and Higgins 2009), and still others identify a U-shaped effect, where men with either traditional or egalitarian views report higher ideal family sizes (Miettinen et al 2011).…”

Gender Differences in the Relationship Between Household Position and Health in Twelve European Countries: Are They Associated with the Value Climate?

“…Gender roles define the extent to which deviations from the gendered division of work are feasible and socially accepted (Sayer and Bianchi 2000;Cooke and Gash 2010). Although there appears to be a convergence of gender roles within the household, this process is still unfinished (McDonald 2000;Puur et al 2008), and there is a lack of adaptation between the demographic behavior of partnership/family formation and the distribution of labor within the family. These macro-level factors must be taken into account when exploring the gendered association between household arrangements and individual health in different countries.…”