Gender Equality in Comparative Perspective 1 |
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| Session Organisers | Dr Natalia Soboleva (LCSR National Research University Higher School of Economics) Dr Vera Lomazzi (GESIS - Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences) Dr Beatrice Elena Chromková Manea (Masaryk University) |
| Time | Wednesday 17th July, 14:00 - 15:00 |
| Room | D26 |
Countries vary a lot in the level of the gender equality. Some countries accept norms of gender equality while in others traditional gender role attitudes are still prevalent (Braun & Gloeckner-Rist 2011, Inglehart & Norris 2003, Fortin 2005). These tendencies depend upon different determinants ranging from cultural differences in the countries to the characteristics of the labour market. Gender role attitudes in their turn impact the behavior in different spheres such as family, labour market, etc.
Although gender equality is a very popular topic, many conceptual questions are still unclear. Popular cross-country datasets include a variety of items on gender role attitudes. However, the issue remains whether these items are comparable across countries. For example, the popular scales in European Values Study, World Values Survey, Gender and Generation Survey, European Social Survey and International Social Survey Programme have different factorial structure across countries or present problems in comparability across large samples (Braun 2009, Constantin & Voicu 2015, Van Vlimmen et al. 2016, Lomazzi 2017).
The session welcomes papers that study different aspects of gender equality in a comparative perspective. Authors are invited to submit papers based on European Values Study, European Social Survey, and other datasets that allow making cross-country or cross-regional comparisons. Contributions can be either theoretically or empirically based. We are particularly interested in research addressing the following topics:
• Comparison of different gender equality indices;
• Macro- and micro-level determinants of gender equality;
• The relation between gender role attitudes and behavior;
• The impact of gender role attitudes on different life spheres (e.g. family, labour market, politics, social solidarity, etc.);
• Tendencies in gender equality values and their impact upon social policy.
Keywords: gender equality, gender role attitudes, comparative research, cross-country comparison, comparability
Miss Sapphire Han (Statistics Netherlands) - Presenting Author
Professor Aat Liefbroer (Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute)
Professor Cees Elzinga (VU vrij universiteit Amsterdam)
Recent theories about social and demographic change suggest the emergence of destandardized and diversified pathways to adulthood. The transition to adulthood is a phase in the life course where many events like leaving the parental home, and entering the labor-market and/or postsecondary education take place. In addition, these events that are often interlinked. The interplay of taking on career and family roles is also likely to be gendered. Research interlinking the family to career trajectories is scarce. Our previous work demonstrated the application of Latent Markov models help to uncover the mechanism in the family formation process and the roles played by gender and education level of a set of French Generations and Gender Programme (GGP) data. This study aims to examine the extent to which family and career sequences influencing each other during the transition to adulthood for men and women using multi-channel (Latent) Markov models, as well as testing hypotheses on social class- and gender, using data from the from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth from 1997, a panel study conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which provides full monthly life course sequence data of men and women between age 17 to 27. Our result shows clear interlinks in career-family sequences and different pathways for females and males: full-time employment oriented pathway for males and child-birth oriented for females. Multi-channel (Latent) Markov chain models are also applicable when comparing gender difference in career-family sequences in cross-national context.
Ms Neli Esipova (Gallup) - Presenting Author
Ms Julie Ray (Gallup)
Ms Anita Pugliese (Gallup)
Although women make up half of the world's population, barely half of them today are participating in the workforce. Recent global research by Gallup and the International Labour Organization shows this is not what most of the world's women -- or men -- want. This paper will look at Gallup’s measure of women’s employment around the world and delve into what women and men want women’s roles to be and the barriers they see to their participation in paid work.
Gallup asked nearly 149,000 women and men in 142 countries and territories about their attitudes toward women and the world of work. One of the key findings to emerge from this research is that women's lack of participation in the workforce doesn't mean that they want to stay at home. In fact, the majority of women worldwide who are out of the workforce (meaning they were not employed within the past seven days, are not looking for work and/or are not available to start work) say they would like either to work at paid jobs or to work and care for their homes and families.
Dr Natalia Soboleva (Laboratory for Comparative Social Research Higher School of Economics) - Presenting Author
Gender-role attitudes are largely formed in the parental family because children see some definite distribution of gender roles. Also parents with different education and social status are likely to transmit different types of values to their children as higher education and social status lead to more egalitarian gender attitudes (Van de Werfhorst, Kraaykamp 2001; Guveli, Need, De Graaf 2007; Cunningham 2008). The objective of this research is to reveal the impact of parental family on gender-role attitudes across European countries with different economic and cultural characteristics. Theoretically, I base this research on the ‘plethora of capitals’ framework according to which the process of childbearing and socialization is regarded as investment (planned and unintentional) in different forms of capital. According to Bourdieu, children from wealthier, happier and more cultural families become more educated and cultural, because they have more favorable habitus (Bourdieu, 1986). In this research I extend this framework of P. Bourdieu by incorporating into analysis country characteristics such as GDP per capita, religious diversity index, etc. I argue that the process of socialization is affected not only by situation in the family but also in the society in general. The European Values Study (the waves of 2008 and 2017) is used as a dataset. The results for EVS 2008 show that along with educational and cultural capital of parents, a very important factor shaping gender role attitudes of children is religiosity. Highly religious individuals whose parents possessed higher human and cultural capital share more traditional views regarding gender equality as compared to less religious individuals. The effect of parental social status is higher in countries with higher GDP per capita. Thus, the study demonstrates the importance of family environment (Bourdieu 1986) and economic development (Inglehart, Welzel 2005) in forming gender-role attitudes. During the conference the results for EVS 2017 will be also presented.