Although some scholars have demonstrated that labor force participation leads to more egalitarian gender role attitudes among women, recent research has reported that this relationship is attenuated among evangelical women. This latter study suggested that evangelical women in the labor force retain their traditional gender role attitudes on family roles. This study offers one explanation for this result: Many evangelical women in the labor force retain their identity as homemakers. Moreover, although nonevangelical women who enter the labor force adopt an identity as a working woman, many evangelical women already hold such an identity before they enter the labor force. This suggests that they experience less of a change in their social identity when they enter the labor force, and that the identity of working woman has a different meaning for evangelical women than for nonevangelical women.
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