Does parenthood modify attitudes about gender relations? : An attitudinal study comparing an egalitarian and traditional policy context

Family policies are a recognised instrument to improve gender equality by encouraging fathers to increase their participation in the private sphere. Previous research has found that attitudes about how paid and unpaid labour should be divided between partners differ between countries by varied support for traditional male breadwinner models and sharing models. On the other hand, behavioural studies have found that parenthood tends to modify gender relations by making them more traditional. This study aims to analyse if there are similar differences in attitudes between parents and individuals without children or if there is a dissonance between behaviour and attitudes. The importance of institutional context is taken into account by comparing these groups in an egalitarian and traditional policy context. The analytical strategy includes using quantitative data from the International Social Survey Programme from 2012, comprising 5385 respondents from Norway, Sweden, Germany and Poland. The association between attitudes about the division of paid and unpaid work and parenthood is analysed by applying multiple linear regression. The results are that parenting has a conservative effect on attitudes in a traditional policy context as parents with small children have a lower probability of egalitarian attitudes. In the egalitarian policy context, no such differences are found. Instead, gender seems to partly modify the association between parenthood and attitudes as mothers with toddlers have a higher probability of egalitarian attitudes than fathers with children between school age and 17 years old. Therefore, institutional contexts seem highly relevant for attitudes about the gendered division of labour. In the traditional policy context, institutional structures and norms seem to result in individuals correcting a discrepancy between attitudes and behaviour to reduce dissonance. On the other hand, the findings in the egalitarian countries point to contextual mechanisms which allow a dissonance between attitudes and behaviour to exist without individuals needing to correct the inconsistency