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RESEARCH PRODUCT

What is your couple type? Gender ideology, housework-sharing, and babies

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AbstractBACKGROUNDIt is increasingly acknowledged that not only gender equality but also gender ideology plays a role in explaining fertility in advanced societies. In a micro perspective, the potential mismatch between gender equality (i.e., the actual sharing taking place in a couple) and gender ideology (i.e., attitudes and beliefs regarding gender roles) may drive childbearing decisions.OBJECTIVEThis paper assesses the impact of consistency between gender equality in attitudes and equality in the division of household labour on the likelihood of having another child, for different parities.METHODSRelying on two-wave panel data of the Bulgarian, Czech, French, Hungarian, and Lithuanian Generations and Gender Surveys, we build a couple typology defined by gender attitudes and housework-sharing. The typology identifies four types of couple: 1) gender-unequal attitudes and gender-unequal housework-sharing; 2) gender-equal attitudes and gender-unequal housework-sharing; 3) gender-unequal attitudes and gender-equal housework-sharing; 4) gender-equal attitudes and gender-equal housework-sharing. The couple types enter into a logistic regression model on childbirth.RESULTSThe impact of the typology varies with parity and gender: taking as reference category the case of gender-equal attitudes and gender-equal division of housework, the effect of all the other couple types on a new childbirth is strong and negative for the second child and female respondents.CONCLUSIONSThe consistency between gender ideology and actual partners' housework-sharing is only favourable for childbearing as long as there is gender equality in both the dimensions.1. IntroductionIn the last few decades most developed countries have witnessed a dramatic change in gender roles and attitudes. Whereas some European countries, most notably the Nordic ones, have moved peremptorily towards gender egalitarianism both in the public sphere (i.e., the education system and the job market) and in the private sphere (i.e., the housework and childcare gender role-set), other countries appear to have experienced substantive changes in the first sphere but less in the family sphere, a feature epitomised as the "stalled gender revolution" (Hochschild and Machung 1990). Recent studies suggest that gender equality at the family level is also linked to reproductive behaviour, and stronger gender equality appears to be associated with higher fertility (e.g., Neyer, Lappegard, and Vignoli 2013; Olah 2003; Duvander and Andersson 2006). Higher gender equality may very well lead to higher fertility; more important however, as one moves away from the male breadwinner model, is the potential mismatch between gender equality (i.e., the actual sharing taking place across genders) and gender ideology (i.e., the "attitudes regarding the appropriate roles, rights, and responsibilities of women and men in society"; Kroska 2007). The mismatch between the two might result in "unfulfilled expectations", and such a feeling of disappointment may lower fertility. To exemplify, if the woman has liberal attitudes towards gender roles (i.e., she has an egalitarian ideology regarding gender roles and gender relations in the couple), and the man does not fulfil her expectations through sharing household tasks, she might derive lower satisfaction from the partnership, which in turn may lower the chances for the couple agreeing on having children, which presumably lowers overall fertility (Mencarini and Sironi 2012; Aassve at al. 2014a). There is some evidence suggesting that, indeed, inconsistency between attitudes toward couples' sharing of tasks and actual division of housework reduces the likelihood of continued childbearing even in a high gender-equal society like Sweden (Goldscheider, Bernhardt, and Branden 2013).Our analysis follows up on these ideas and tackles the issue directly. Our hypothesis is that the mismatch between actual gender division of housework with respect to attitudes and beliefs regarding gender roles matters for explaining childbearing outcomes. …