Northern Irish Attitudes Toward Gendered Family Roles Before and After the Good Friday Agreement

Abstract

The study investigates attitudes about the gendered division of labor in families in Northern Ireland. There is a paucity of existing research on this topic, and previous studies lack even basic controls for potential confounding factors. Northern Ireland is a particularly interesting case due to its history of violent conflict and to the strong salience of religion in the region. The current study investigates patterns of change in gender attitudes as the region moved from a period of relatively intense conflict to one of reduced conflict intensity. In order to make inferences about the influence of violent conflict on gender ideology, the analysis compares gender attitudes in Northern Ireland with those in eight other European countries and also assesses the influence of religious community membership on gender attitudes change. Data come from the 1994 and 2002 waves of the International Social Survey Program, supplemented with additional survey data from Northern Ireland. The findings offer little evidence that Northern Irish individuals increased their support for women’s non-domestic roles as the conflict’s intensity waned. Multivariate regression models suggest, further, that while Catholics were more egalitarian than Protestants in the early period, Catholic support for egalitarian family roles decreased between 1994 and 2002.