Cross-national evidence on trends in support for working mothers

Abstract

The rise in married women's labor force participation and the liberalization of gender attitudes are two developments shaping families around the globe. In light of the primacy in childrearing which cultures assign to mothers, this paper focuses on changes over time in approval of paid work by mothers with very young children. Cross-national data from the 1988 and 2002 modules of the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) permit us to analyze the mechanisms accounting for changes in attitudes toward maternal employment in seven industrialized countries- Austria, Germany (West), Great Britain, Hungary, Ireland, the Netherlands, and the U.S. We address four questions: 1) Did approval of maternal employment show similar change in all seven countries? 2) What respondent characteristics were associated with support for working mothers? 3) Did the association for any of these characteristics change over time? 4) To what extent did the demographic changes in population composition (e.g., the growth in a highly educated population segment more favorable to maternal employment) account for changes in attitudes? The analysis confirms widespread increases in approval of maternal employment for both men and women. Most relationships between individual characteristics and attitudes remained unchanged over the course of the study. On the whole, compositional changes in the populations contributed modestly to the liberalization of attitudes.