Are Muslim immigrants assimilating? Cultural assimilation trajectories in immigrants’ attitudes toward gender roles in Europe

Abstract

ABSTRACT As public attitudes toward gender roles in Western societies become increasingly liberal, Muslim immigrants and their children in Europe are regarded as conservative and unassimilated. This study treats acculturation as a process by which immigrants and their children shift from the attitude distribution in their origin country to that of their settlement country, and distinguishes the influence of Islam and origin-country gender norms on Muslim immigrants’ and their children’s gender role attitudes. Using data on gender role attitudes from 32 European settlement countries and 98 origin countries, the study models the relative influence of origin and settlement contexts on 25,220 first- and second-generation immigrants in Europe. Similar to previous studies, this study finds that Muslim immigrants have more traditional gender role attitudes than non-Muslim immigrants when controlling for the effect of origin-country gender norms. However, there is no evidence that Muslims are more attached to their origin country’s gender norms than non-Muslims. Instead, Muslim immigrants’ attitudes about gender norms are more similar to those in the settlement society than those of non-Muslim immigrants: Unlike their foreign-born parents, second-generation Muslims are as liberal as non-Muslim populations. Taken together, these results suggest that second-generation Muslims are adopting mainstream European gender norms.