Two Decades of Gender Role Attitudes in Europe

Over the last two decades, we’ve seen a remarkable shift in attitudes towards women in the workforce—but when it comes to work and family, how much have our gender roles really changed?

This week’s WAPPP seminar featured an investigation of changing gender role attitudes in 17 European countries from 1990-2010. Professor Mary Brinton, Reischauer Institute Professor and Department Chair of Sociology at Harvard University, discussed her work with graduate student Carly Knight on the rise of gender egalitarian attitudes.

The inspiration for this project comes from the “stalled gender role revolution” beginning in the early 1990’s. The pace of change has stagnated in a number of areas, including closing the wage gap, decreasing occupational sex segregation, and changing household gender roles. Professor Brinton finds that beliefs about male superiority have decreased drastically over time, but may have been supplanted by gender essentialist notions of what is “normal” for men and women that have slowed changes in gender roles. Gender essentialism is not necessarily opposed to egalitarianism: it is possible to consider men and women equal but different in significant ways. Critically, Professor Brinton notes, gender role attitudes seem to be multidimensional: we should not expect a straight-line continuum from traditional to egalitarian attitudes. Instead, there may be many different “egalitarianisms” that have different levels of essentialism and respect for individual choices. This research project is intended to parse the different dimensions of gender role attitudes.

The key questions in this research are whether traditional (male breadwinner) gender role attitudes are declining everywhere in the postindustrial world, and if so, what is replacing them? To test these questions, Professor Brinton studied responses to the World Values Survey and European Values Survey from 17 European countries from 1990-2010. In particular, she focused on the items in the survey that had to do with men’s and women’s roles in the labor market and in the family. Specifically, she used data from respondents asked to rate their agreement or disagreement with the following seven statements:

1. A working woman needs to have children in order to be fulfilled
2. A working mother can establish just as warm and secure a relationship with her children as a mother who doesn’t work.
3. Being a housewife is just as fulfilling as working for pay.
4. Both husband and wife should contribute to household income.
5. A job is all right, but what most women want is a home and children.
6. Having a job is the best way for a woman to be an independent person.
7. When jobs are scarce, a man should have more right to a job than a woman.

Using latent class analysis, Professor Brinton grouped individuals into clusters based on their attitudes toward these seven statements. The results yielded four gender role attitude “classes.”

The first, traditionalism, is just what we would expect in terms of male and female roles in the labor market and family. Traditionalists comprise 23% of the overall sample.

The second, work egalitarian, is most closely associated with thinking that men and women should both work. Work egalitarians strongly disagree that men have more right to a job than a woman in tough times and agree that working mothers can establish just a strong a relationship with their children as stay-at-home mothers. Work egalitarians make up 29% of the total sample.

The third category, dual-responsibility egalitarian, comprises 30% of the total sample. Dual-responsibility egalitarians think that women should work, but also demonstrate a great deal of gender essentialism when it comes to women’s roles in the family. This group strongly agrees that women should work, but also feel that women need a family and children. Dual-responsibility egalitarians place significant emphasis on what women should do based on their identity as women.

By contrast, the fourth group, flexible egalitarian, believes that women have choices and that all choices are valid. Only 18% of the total sample falls into this group, which is characterized by the beliefs that working mothers can establish strong relationships with their children and that being a housewife can be just as fulfilling as paid labor.

Having identified these four categories, Professor Brinton set out to track the change in prevalence of each attitude class over time. The prevalence of traditional gender role attitudes has dropped precipitously: 40% of the 1990 sample espoused traditional views, down to 10% in 2010. Work egalitarian and dual-responsibility egalitarian attitudes have increased the most over this period: flexible egalitarian attitudes remain somewhat rare.

Professor Brinton compared a few individual countries’ paths of change within the sample. In Hungary and Poland, dual-responsibility egalitarianism has generally replaced traditionalism. By contrast, in Germany, Spain, and Denmark, work egalitarianism is most prominent. Other than the decrease in traditionalism, there hasn’t been a significant convergence toward any particular egalitarianism in the 17 countries in the sample.

This work opens up the opportunity for much more research: this analysis descriptively defines the types and changes in attitudes, but doesn’t tell us much about who holds these views. For example, flexible egalitarianism may be constrained by social class, as only certain women can afford to have choices. Further, the surveys have only just begun to add items about expectations for men’s roles. We look forward to more work on changing gender role attitudes in the future!

Keeping the Peace: the Case Study of an All-Female Peacekeeping Unit

This week’s WAPPP seminar, “All-Female Contingents on the Front Lines of Peace and Conflict,” covered the case study of the all-female peacekeeping unit in the southern Philippines charged with ensuring that the 2014 ceasefire agreement between the Government of the Philippines and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front is upheld. Margaret Jenkins, Research Associate at Georgetown University's Institute for Women, Peace & Security and a current WAPPP Fellow, presented her research on the subject, as the first half of a two-year research project on the effectiveness and experience of all-female contingents working in conflict zones.

Despite the goal of having women make up 20% of UN peacekeepers by 2015, under 5% of current peacekeepers are female. Jenkins considers this unit in the Philippines to be an innovative insight into why progress is so slow, calling it an “in your face” example of gender mainstreaming in this field. She argued that the case is so important because it a) amplifies the debate over mainstreaming via an all-female unit and b) lends itself to comparative research with all-male units.

After decades of fighting between the Moro insurgency and the Government, which left 100,000 people dead and thousands more displaced, a political agreement was signed - although not ratified - between the two parties last year. Following this agreement, Mary Ann Arnado, Secretary General of the Mindanao Peoples Caucus, suggested the creation of an all-female peacekeeping contingent in addition to the other, largely conservative, Muslim and all-male units in the area.

As might be expected, there has been pushback in response to the all-female contingent. The women in the unit have noted that they feel like they haven’t been taken that seriously, while some are concerned that their duties as peacekeepers violate their religious obligations to live within strict gender norms. Some outsiders have expressed concern that the unit’s purpose is based on foreign or Western ideas, as well as questioned whether the unit is tough enough or if its members have the necessary skills and awareness for the task at hand. The unit has responded strongly to such concerns, citing international law to defend their legitimacy and building relationships within the communities served.

Though some might assume that fighting gender-based violence (GBV) would be a priority for an all-female unit considering that women are overwhelmingly the victims of gender-motivated crimes, the unit has a particular jurisdiction that does not focus on GBV. They are tasked primarily with monitoring the ceasefire, just like other civilian protection groups in the region. However, Jenkins recounted incidents involving rape in which the local communities and tribes called on the local knowledge of the all-female contingent for help.

Jenkins examined the cohesion and diversity of the unit and found that diversity is central to the contingent. The women serve in a very diverse region with a long history of sectarian violence, to the point where many of the women in the unit had never interacted with a woman of another religion prior to serving together in this mission. The unit itself is comprised of indigenous women, Christian women and Muslim women all from same area, with ages ranging from 22 to mid-60s. A major policy lesson Jenkins took from this case is how the effectiveness of the unit lies in the women’s local knowledge and this dedication to diversity. 

Much of the justification behind creating and maintaining an all-female contingent is based on essentialist arguments - i.e. that women bring something unique to the table, such as their inherent peacefulness, experience as caregivers, etc. - which many in the field find problematic. Jenkins emphasized the need to analyze the effectiveness of such units, the same as how any other peacekeeping unit would be evaluated. She hopes that her future research will focus on a similar all-female peacekeeping unit in Sudan, which has recently been recognized internationally, as well as all-female UN contingents.