Gender roles and infant/toddler care: Male and female professors on the tenure track.

Abstract

This study seeks to determine the association between gender role attitudes about childcare, utilization of parental leave policies and parental/infant preferences, on the one hand, and the distribution of childcare in the families of assistant professors with children under two on the other. Both utilization of paid parental leave policies by men and men’s belief in non-traditional gender roles are associated with higher levels of participation in parenting tasks. However, even those male professors who take leave and believe in nontraditional gender roles do much less childcare relative to their spouses than female professors do. This result holds even when the male professor’s wife works full time. Our results suggest that one reason why female professors do more childcare may be that they like it more than men do. The association of enjoyment of childcare with gender role attitudes or leave-taking status is not statistically significant, which suggests that sex differences in the enjoyment of childcare will not be easily changed by changes in policies or gender role ideology. Accordingly, when exploring the stickiness of gender roles with respect to infant and toddler care, it would seem prudent to consider biological and evolutionary explanations as well as those focusing on institutions and gender ideology.