Support for Traditional Female Roles across 32 Countries: Female Labour Market Participation, Policy Models and Gender Differences

Abstract

In this research we study support for traditional female roles. We test individual and contextual explanations for differences in support for traditional female roles within and across 32 countries. Higher educated, employed people and those who do not adhere to a religion are least supportive. The higher the female labour market participation, the less traditional the average citizen is: this contextual effect is stronger for women than for men. Governmental child care expenditure does not affect average levels of support for traditional female roles. Yet, we do find a significant drop in traditional attitudes for men, when governments spend more on child care. This shows the importance of including the possibility of differences in contextual effects for men and women.

Does the Cultural Context Matter? The effect of a country's gender-role attitudes on female labor supply

“…In line with findings by Kalmijn (2003) for the 1999 EVS wave and André et al (2013) for the 2002 wave of the International Social Survey Programme, I find variation in gender-role attitudes between the 33 countries I selected for analysis from the 2008 EVS wave. Unreported multilevel analysis on all survey respondents (both men and women) document that the country variance is statistically significant (p < 0.01), but the proportion of variance explained by countries (the intraclass correlation) is small with 12%.…”

“…The final gender-role attitude measure was constructed by computing the mean over the eight items, under the condition that for each respondent at least five items were nonmissing (only 17 respondents did not meet this criterion and were dropped from the analyses). Alpha reliability scores were higher in Western European countries (0.69) than Eastern European countries (0.57), a finding that has been noted earlier (André et al 2013). Note that countries with scores lower than 0.50 were already dropped from the analytical sample.…”

“…5. For 21 countries in the sample a measure of public childcare expenditure was available (see André et al 2013). GEM correlates strongly with the public childcare measure (r = 0.65, p = 0.001), which raises confidence that GEM measures institutional support for female employment.…”

“…It is important to control for variables as age, children, partner status, and education because these variables are known to influence women's labor force supply as well as gender-role attitudes. For example, earlier crosscomparative research has shown that countries with a larger share of higher educated are characterized by more egalitarian gender-role attitudes (Kalmijn 2003;André et al 2013). It may therefore not be the national gender-role attitudes that affect individual women's labor supply, but the educational composition of the population (cf.…”

“…Cross-comparative studies have demonstrated that gender-role attitudes vary between the citizens of European countries (Kalmijn 2003;André et al 2013). People from the Scandinavian countries are, for example, much more in favor of an active position of women on the labor market than people elsewhere in Europe.…”