Cohort change, diffusion, and support for gender egalitarianism in cross-national perspective

Abstract

Abstract Arguments about the spread of gender egalitarian values through a population highlight several sources of change. First, structural arguments point to increases in the proportion of women with high education, jobs with good pay, commitment to careers outside the family, and direct interests in gender equality. Second, value-shift arguments contend that gender norms change with economic affluence among women and men in diverse positions-at all levels of education, for example. Third, diffusion arguments suggest that structural changes lead to adoption of new ideas and values supportive of gender equality by innovative, high-education groups, but that the new ideas later diffuse to other groups. This study tests these arguments by using International Social Survey Program surveys in 1988, 1994, and 2002 for 19 nations to examine gender egalitarianism across 85 cohorts born from roughly 1900 to 1984. Multilevel models support diffusion arguments by demonstrating that the effects of education first strengthen with early adoption of gender egalitarianism and then weaken as other groups come to accept the same views. However, the evidence of a sequence of divergence and convergence in educational differences across cohorts appears most clearly for women in Western nations. (ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.) 1. Introduction Under the broad term of the second demographic transition, demographers have described the wide-ranging changes that have occurred in living arrangements, gender roles, and childbearing (e.g., Lesthaeghe 2010). The changes encompass not only new behaviors involving sexual freedom, declining fertility, childbearing outside of marriage, and a greater variety of family forms (cohabitation, divorce, blended families, living alone) but also underlying value changes of individual autonomy, social equality, and tolerance of diversity (Lesthaeghe and Surkyn 1988). Central to the second demographic transition and to the broader liberalization of values are new roles for women and more favorable values, attitudes, and beliefs toward gender equality (or gender egalitarianism for short). The progress made over past decades toward the goal of widespread support for gender equality (Fischer and Hout 2006; Jackson 1998; Thornton and Young-DeMarco 2001) has affected most demographic processes, including fertility (Goldscheider, Olah, and Puur 2010; Rindfuss, Brewster, and Kavee 1996), childlessness (Henz 2008), combining work and family responsibilities (Olah and Bernhardt 2008), job segregation (Charles and Bradley 2002), and family relationships (Amato and Booth 1995; Kaufman 2000). Demographers have also noted that a good part of the change in gender egalitarianism involves processes of cohort differentiation and replacement. The cohort approach to societal change follows a long tradition (Ryder 1965) in emphasizing the importance of the economic and ideational context at the time of a cohort's youth. Relatively stable values, attitudes, and beliefs that develop during youth and young adulthood endure over the later life course, and change comes from replacement of older cohorts raised decades ago with younger cohorts raised more recently. Numerous studies have demonstrated that differences in gender egalitarianism stem in large part from cohort membership (Brooks and Bolzendahl 2004; Firebaugh 1992; Inglehart and Norris 2003; Schnittker, Freese, and Powell 2003; Scott, Alwin, and Braun 1996). In a recent article, Pampel (2011) evaluated several cohort-based explanations of increasing gender egalitarianism. Using data from the General Social Surveys of the United States and focusing on differences across cohorts born from 1900 to 1985, support was found for a diffusion theory that predicts changes in the socioeconomic distribution as well as the level of gender egalitarianism. More limited support was found for competing theories that emphasize the importance of either structural change in levels of female education and labor force participation or broad cultural changes in values affecting all education and labor force groups. …