Volume 25 - Article 21 | Pages 667–694  

Cohort change, diffusion, and support for gender egalitarianism in cross-national perspective

By Fred Pampel

Abstract

Arguments about the spread of gender egalitarian values through a population highlight several sources of change. First, structural arguments point to increases in the proportion of women with high education, jobs with good pay, commitment to careers outside the family, and direct interests in gender equality. Second, value-shift arguments contend that gender norms change with economic affluence among women and men in diverse positions—at all levels of education, for example. Third, diffusion arguments suggest that structural changes lead to adoption of new ideas and values supportive of gender equality by innovative, high-education groups, but that the new ideas later diffuse to other groups. This study tests these arguments by using International Social Survey Program surveys in 1988, 1994, and 2002 for 19 nations to examine gender egalitarianism across 85 cohorts born from roughly 1900 to 1984. Multilevel models support diffusion arguments by demonstrating that the effects of education first strengthen with early adoption of gender egalitarianism and then weaken as other groups come to accept the same views. However, the evidence of a sequence of divergence and convergence in educational differences across cohorts appears most clearly for women in Western nations.

Author’s Affiliation

• Fred Pampel - University of Colorado Boulder, United States of America EMAIL

Other articles by the same author/authors in Demographic Research

Forecasting sex differences in mortality in high income nations: The contribution of smoking
Volume 13 - Article 18

Similar articles in Demographic Research

Diffusion of innovation in family size ideation and acceptability of contraceptive use between migrants and non-migrants in rural Senegal
Volume 55 - Article 23    | Keywords: contraception, diffusion, ideal family size, Senegal, social influence, social learning, social network, sub-Saharan Africa

Work–family balance during the pandemic: Longitudinal evidence from 27 European countries
Volume 55 - Article 22    | Keywords: COVID-19, family-to-work balance, gender, longitudinal analysis, resilience, work-to-family balance

Local house prices and first births in Belgium: Subgroup variation by education and migration background
Volume 55 - Article 19    | Keywords: Belgium, education, housing, migration background, parenthood

Heterogeneity in women’s public and private agency across sub-Saharan Africa
Volume 55 - Article 7    | Keywords: agency, gender equality, health disparities, heterogeneity, latent class analysis, sub-Saharan Africa, sustainable development goals, women status

Changing roles of marriage and family status for labor migration? The case of rural China
Volume 55 - Article 5    | Keywords: cohort trends, event history analysis, gender, labour migration, rural China