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Housework as a Woman's Job? What Looks Like Gender Ideologies Could Also Be Stereotypes

By on September 3, 2024 in Articles

Katrin Auspurg, Sabine Düval

Sociological Science September 3, 2024
10.15195/v11.a29

Abstract

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We question the validity of standard measures of gender ideology. When asked about “men” and “women” in general, respondents may imagine women (men) with lower (higher) labor market resources. Therefore, standard measures may conflate gender ideologies (injunctive norms) with stereotypical beliefs (descriptive norms). We test this hypothesis with an experiment in the German family panel pairfam: ∼1,200 respondents rated the appropriate division of housework in ∼3,700 hypothetical couples. By gradually adding information about labor market resources, we were able to override respondents’ stereotypical beliefs. We find that with more information, even “traditional” respondents support egalitarian housework arrangements. The main difference between “traditional” and “egalitarian” respondents is not in their ideologies (as previously thought), but in their interpretation of vague items. This leads us to conclude that standard measures overestimate traditional gender ideologies. Our study also illustrates how varying the amount of information can help identify respondents’ implicit beliefs.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Katrin Auspurg: Department of Sociology, LMU Munich
E-mail: katrin.auspurg@lmu.de

Sabine Düval: German Youth Institute (DJI)
E-mail: dueval@dji.de

Acknowledgements: We thank the participants of the Conference of the European Survey Research Association (ESRA) in 2019, the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 2019, the pairfam User Conference in 2019, and the seminar on “Analytical Sociology: Theory and Empirical Applications” at at the Venice International University in 2018 for helpful suggestions. We are also grateful for comments on an earlier version we received from Josef Brüderl. We used data from the German Family Panel pairfam, coordinated by Josef Brüderl, Sonja Drobniè, Karsten Hank, Johannes Huinink, Bernhard Nauck, Franz J. Neyer, and Sabine Walper. From 2004 to 2022, pairfam was funded as priority program and long-term project by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Sabine Düval worked on the manuscript and data analysis mainly during her PhD studies at the LMU Munich. Part of this work was done while Katrin Auspurg was a Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence.

Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: The data we used (pairfam data release 10.0) can be accessed here: https://www.pairfam.de/en/data/data-access. Our replication files (Stata dofiles and data on response times not included in the pairfam release) are available on the following OSF platform: https://osf.io/3fqw9 (Auspurg and Düval 2024).

  • Citation: Auspurg, Katrin, and Sabine Düval. 2024. “Housework as a Woman’s Job?: What Looks Like Gender Ideologies Could Also Be Stereotypes.” Sociological Science 11: 789-814.
  • Received: September 21, 2023
  • Accepted: February 22, 2024
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Maria Abascal
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a29


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Why Does Parental Divorce Lower Children’s Educational Attainment? A Causal Mediation Analysis

By on April 16, 2019 in Articles

Jennie E. Brand, Ravaris Moore, Xi Song, Yu Xie

Sociological Science, April 16, 2019
10.15195/v6.a11

Abstract
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Mechanisms explaining the negative effects of parental divorce on children’s attainment have long been conjectured and assessed. Yet few studies of parental divorce have carefully attended to the assumptions and methods necessary to estimate causal mediation effects. Applying a causal framework to linked U.S. panel data, we assess the degree to which parental divorce limits children’s education among whites and nonwhites and whether observed lower levels of educational attainment are explained by postdivorce family conditions and children’s skills. Our analyses yield three key findings. First, the negative effect of divorce on educational attainment, particularly college, is substantial for white children; by contrast, divorce does not lower the educational attainment of nonwhite children. Second, declines in family income explain as much as one- to two-thirds of the negative effect of parental divorce on white children’s education. Family instability also helps explain the effect, particularly when divorce occurs in early childhood. Children’s psychosocial skills explain about one-fifth of the effect, whereas children’s cognitive skills play a minimal role. Third, among nonwhites, the minimal total effect on education is explained by the offsetting influence of postdivorce declines in family income and stability alongside increases in children’s psychosocial and cognitive skills.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Jennie E. Brand: Departments of Sociology and Statistics, University of California, Los Angeles; California Center for Population Research; and Center for Social Statistics
E-mail: brand@soc.ucla.edu

Ravaris Moore: Department of Sociology, Loyola Marymount University
E-mail: ravaris.moore@lmu.edu

Xi Song: Department of Sociology, University of Chicago
E-mail: xisong@uchicago.edu

Yu Xie: Department of Sociology, Princeton University
E-mail: yuxie@princeton.edu

Acknowledgements: Versions of this article were presented at Yale University; the University of Michigan; Stanford University; the University of Pennsylvania; Princeton University; Harvard University; the University of California, Irvine; the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility (RC28), and Population Association of America. We thank Elizabeth Thomson for useful comments on a prior version of this article. The National Institutes of Health (grant R01 HD07460301A1) provided financial support for this research. J. E. B. and R. M. benefited from facilities and resources provided by the California Center for Population Research at the University of California, Los Angeles, which receives core support (P2C-HD041022) from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The ideas expressed herein are those of the authors.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Brand, Jennie E., Ravaris Moore, Xi Song, and Yu Xie. 2019. “Why Does Parental Divorce Lower Children’s Educational Attainment? A Causal Mediation Analysis.” Sociological Science 6: 264-292.
  • Received: January 25, 2019
  • Accepted: February 24, 2019
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson
  • DOI: 10.15195/v6.a11


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