This article was originally published in April 2018.
LCC researchers Dr Francisco Perales, Dr Yara Jarallah, and Professor Janeen Baxter have published a new paper in Social Forces titled, ‘Men’s and Women’s Gender-Role Attitudes across the Transition to Parenthood: Accounting for Child’s Gender’.
Gender-role attitudes have been linked to the production and reproduction of gender inequality in different social spheres. Using Australian panel data from the Household, Income, and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, the authors examine patterns of gender-attitude shifts that accompany parenthood. Their findings reveal that men’s and women’s gender-role attitudes become more traditional when they become parents, with evidence that this process is more pronounced among men, parents of daughters and, most of all, male parents of daughters.
The authors suggest that this process may be problematic if it means that Australian girls are raised in family environments in which parents are less likely to appreciate and invest in their talents, for example, by tracking them into gender-typical educational pathways. In this scenario, the comparatively higher rates of gender-role traditionalization observed for parents of firstborn girls would result in their daughters encountering obstacles that limit their life chances not only outside but also within the family home beginning early in their life course, even if their parents are well intentioned. Such a situation may constitute an important factor hampering much needed progress toward gender equality in Australia.
You can find the paper here.