Public Gender Egalitarianism: A Dataset of Dynamic Comparative Public Opinion toward Egalitarian Gender Roles in the Public Sphere

Abstract

Societal attitudes toward gender roles in the workplace and politics play a central part in theorizing on the difficulty women face in achieving political equality, but shortcomings in the available data have prevented direct examination of many implications of these theories. Drawing on recent advances in latent-variable modeling of public opinion and a comprehensive collection of survey data, we present the Public Gender Egalitarianism dataset to address this need: comparable estimates of the public's attitudes on gender equality in the public sphere across more than one hundred countries over time. These Public Gender Egalitarianism scores are strongly correlated with responses to individual survey items and with women's rates of participation in the labor force and corporate boards. We expect that the Public Gender Egalitarianism data will become an invaluable source for broadly cross-national and longitudinal research on the causes and consequences of collective attitudes toward gender equality in politics and the economy.

Money Matters! Evidence From a Survey Experiment on Attitudes Toward Maternal Employment Across Contexts in Germany

“…At the same time, however, they agree with the statements that mothers should be home in the afternoon to help their children with homework (Bujard 2017) and that mothers should work full time only after their children have started school (Lietzmann and Wenzig 2017). These findings reveal traditional attitudes toward maternal employment and do not align with the results of attitudinal surveys showing that Germany has become more gender egalitarian (Lois 2020; Woo, Goldberg, and Solt 2023).…”

“…A large body of literature has focused on how gender role attitudes have changed over the last few decades (e.g., Grunow, Begall, and Buchler 2018), and a trend toward increasingly egalitarian gender role attitudes has been identified (Grunow, Begall, and Buchler 2018; Knight and Brinton 2017; Lee, Alwin, and Tufis 2007; Scarborough, Sin, and Risman 2019; Woo, Goldberg, and Solt 2023). Moreover, highly educated respondents and respondents whose mothers worked when they were young are more likely to hold egalitarian gender role attitudes (e.g., Boehnke 2011; Lietzmann and Frodermann 2023).…”

“…Recent work has illustrated some of the shortcomings of established items on gender role attitudes. Currently, most Germans hold egalitarian gender role attitudes with regard to maternal employment, women’s financial independence, and the relationship quality of working mothers with their children (Lois 2020; Woo, Goldberg, and Solt 2023). At the same time, however, they agree with the statements that mothers should be home in the afternoon to help their children with homework (Bujard 2017) and that mothers should work full time only after their children have started school (Lietzmann and Wenzig 2017).…”

Democracy, Public Support, and Measurement Uncertainty

“…As the use of latent variables grows more common, political scientists should be aware that these variables’ concomitant measurement uncertainty cannot be neglected. Recent cross-national time-series measures of, for example, policy ideology across Europe (developed in Caughey, O’Grady, and Warshaw 2019), immigration attitudes in Europe (presented in Claassen and McLaren 2021), and public gender egalitarianism worldwide (introduced in Woo, Allemang, and Solt 2022), make possible a host of previously infeasible analyses, but the resulting research cannot be considered robust if it does not also incorporate these measures’ quantified uncertainty.…”

Bidirectional Relationship between Adolescent Gender Egalitarianism and Prosocial Behavior

“…Gender egalitarianism is a value system that supports men and women having equal roles, rights, and responsibilities [12]. Interest in gender egalitarianism remains high among political psychologists, because public support for gender egalitarianism could reduce societal-level structural gender inequality [13,14] and predict individual-level womenfavoring political attitudes and engagement [15][16][17]. However, a significant omission in the literature could be adolescent gender egalitarianism from a developmental perspective.…”