MULTIDIMENSIONAL MASCULINITIES: GENDER INEQUALITY AND GENERATIONAL CHANGE IN THE 21ST CENTURY
(MULTIDIMENSIONAL)
Research Project
Post-industrialized societies witnessed a massive increase in gender equality in the second part of the 20th century, mainly driven by women’s great increases in college attainments and levels of paid work (Goldin, 2006). This change was labelled in the media and scientific outlets as The Gender Revolution. However, what is considered the ‘second part of the gender revoltuion’ (i.e., men’s incorporation into unpaid work) is lagging well behind. The completition of the “first part” of the gender revolution without a paralell involvement of men in the domestic sphere has often been called The Stalled Revolution (England, 2010). A key way to understand why the gender revolution is stalled is to analyze the changing conceptions of masculities and gender ideologies.
Analysing the changing conceptions of masculities is of key relevance to understand why gender inequality persists nowadays. This is because masculitiny – like femininity and gender ideologies - shape different types of behaviors that later in life create socio-economic inequalities between men and women (Farre & Vella, 2012). In addition, and partially due to such gender attitudinal and behavioral segregation, men and women face unequal opportunities and constrains. While women tend to specialize in care-work related activities, regardless of whether this is paid (e.g., nursery) or unpaid (e.g., housework), men tend to non-care work. The social availabiity of differential preferences, beliefs, ideologies and identities by gender ultimately lead to a disproportionate share of men in positions of power across societies.
Research found that progress towards gender equality – in terms of both ideology and behavior –increased massively during the 1970s until the mid 1990s . However, in the 2000s this progress stopped (i.e., the stalled gender revolution). Charles and Grusky (2004) considered that this is because since the 2000s, we are seeing an increasing ofgender essentialism – the notion that men and women are equal but different. That is, men and women deserve similar rights to power in societies, but women are more capable of some tasks, like taking care of others, or being more careful, than men. Such differenciation of women and men skill, preferences or emotions have led to a new wave of research breaking the dicotomic approach to gender attitudes – that is, that gender ideologies range in a continuum between two oposed sides: gender traditional versus gender egalitarian. Instead, these new studies argue that gender ideologies are multidimensional.
Multidimensional gender ideologies’ literature argues that current gender ideologies are far more complex than a continuum between “gender traditional” and “gender egalitarian”, and such complexity calls for a multidimensional analysis of gender ideologies. The results of these studies find that gender traditionalism (i.e., a woman should take care of the home and a man should provide economically) has waned, but gender parity (i.e., a man and a woman should take equal care for the home and the family, and for providing) has not increased. On the contrary, new dimensions of gender ideologies have emerged during the last decades, namely, for example, “liberal egalitarianism”, “egalitarian familism”, or “flexible egalitarianism”. Each of these three dimensions of gender ideology show different varieties of egalitarianism within the same label of gender-egalitarian attitudes.
In addition, previous studies have multipule relevant issues that have not been scientifically addressed. One is that they are primarely quantitative, thus not being able to capture a more nuanced ways of analyzing gender ideologies. Another is that they capture only clusters of multiple dimensions without considering that these dimensions may operate differently at the individual and macro level and micro levels, or different between men (masculinity) and women (femininity). In fact, these studies are biased toward a traditional vision of gender ideology that is mainly based upon traditional visions of gender roles and, thus, not able to capture multidimensional masculinities. The reason explaining the lack of measures about men’s varieties of egalitarianism is simple: Up to now, the main international surveys on attitudes (i.e., International Social Survey Program [ISSP] and World Values Surveys [WVS]) were designed in the mid 1980s and they reflected the gender visions and divisions of that time. Therefore, they had a rather traditional way of asking questions about gender ideologies. For the first time in history, international surveys on gender attitudes have changed their way of asking opinion questions, allowing researchers to analyse attitudes toward men’s involvement in family life.
The aim of this project is, therefore, studying multidimensional gender ideologies, focusing on the changing attitudes toward men’s involvement in paid and unpaid labor using newly available quantitative data on gender ideologies and masculinities from 34 countries, together with qualitative data based upon focus groups, longitudinal data on time use, and webscrapping and text as a data. In this way, this project contributes to the literature on gender ideologies, masculitinies, and family dynamics in four key ways. First, it will add a mixed method approach by including how narrative about gender ideologies emerge in several socio-economically stratified focus group settings. Second, since ISSP and WVS are just releasing for the first time in history measures on attitudes toward men’s paid and unpaid work, this will be the first study to date to analyse how gender ideologies focused on men -multidimensional masculinities- vary by country, and which are the multilvel effects explaining differences in masculinities ideologies. Third, by using longitudinal time use data, the project will be able to also disentangle period-cohort-age affects on gender inequalities related to behavior.