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How Entry into Parenthood Shapes Gender Role Attitudes: New Evidence from Longitudinal UK Data

Author

Listed:
  • Elena Grinza
  • Francesco Devicienti
  • Mariacristina Rossi
  • Davide Vannoni
Abstract
Attitudes of women and men about how paid and unpaid work should be divided in the couple largely determine women’s earnings and career prospects. Hence, it is important to understand how people’s gender role attitudes are formed and evolve over the lifetime. In this paper, we concentrate on one of the most path-breaking events in life: becoming a parent. Using longitudinal panel data for the UK, we first show that, in general, entry into parenthood significantly shifts women’s attitudes toward more conservative views, while leaving men unaffected. We also show that the impact on women emerges only after some time from the childbirth, suggesting that attitudes change relatively slowly over time and do not react immediately after becoming a parent. Finally, we show that the impact gets large and strongly significant for women and men whose prenatal attitudes were progressive. In particular, we find that the change in attitudes for such individuals increases as the postnatal arrangements are more likely to be traditional. Overall, these findings suggest that the change in attitudes is mainly driven by the emergence of a cognitive dissonance. Broad policy implications are drawn.

Suggested Citation

  • Elena Grinza & Francesco Devicienti & Mariacristina Rossi & Davide Vannoni, 2017. "How Entry into Parenthood Shapes Gender Role Attitudes: New Evidence from Longitudinal UK Data," Carlo Alberto Notebooks 511, Collegio Carlo Alberto.
    • Handle: RePEc:cca:wpaper:511
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    2. Ilyana Kuziemko & Jessica Pan & Jenny Shen & Ebonya Washington, 2018. "The Mommy Effect: Do women anticipate the employment effects of motherhood?," Working Papers 2018-6, Princeton University. Economics Department..
    3. Zhuofei Lu & Shuo Yan & Jeff Jones & Yucheng He & Qigen She, 2023. "From Housewives to Employees, the Mental Benefits of Employment across Women with Different Gender Role Attitudes and Parenthood Status," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 20(5), pages 1-13, February.
    4. Senhu Wang & Zhuofei Lu, 2023. "Is Paid Inflexible Work Better than Unpaid Housework for Women’s Mental Health? The Moderating Role of Parenthood," Applied Research in Quality of Life, Springer;International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies, vol. 18(1), pages 393-409, February.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Gender equality; gender role attitudes; entry into parenthood; cognitive dissonance; changes in the hormonal production; Understanding Society (US) data set.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
    • J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth

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