Trends in U.S. Gender Attitudes,1977 to 2018: Gender and Educational Disparities

Abstract

These figures display gender- and education-related gaps in U.S. gender attitudes from 1977 to 2018. The authors use data from the General Social Survey (N = 57,224) to estimate the historical trajectory of U.S. attitudes about women in politics, familial roles, and working motherhood. Of all attitudes analyzed, Americans hold the most liberal attitudes toward women in politics, with no gender gap and little educational difference on this issue. Attitudes toward familial roles have the largest educational gap but a small gender difference. The gender gap in attitudes toward working motherhood has persisted over time, with women holding more egalitarian attitudes than men. The educational disparity on this issue disappeared during the mid-1990s “stalled gender revolution” but has widened since. Although the “stall” occurred among all gender and educational groups on all four gender attitude measures, the decline was starkest among the college educated regarding working motherhood.

Although public support for women’s status and opportunities is higher now than in any previous period, progress toward gender equality has slowed in recent decades. Many scholars have sought to understand this “stalled gender revolution” (Cotter, Hermsen, and Vanneman 2011; England 2010; Shu and Meagher 2018). However, less is known about historical dynamics in gender attitudes across different social groups and attitudinal dimensions. We use 21 waves of data from the General Social Survey to examine gender- and education-related gaps in attitudes toward women in politics, familial roles, and working motherhood from 1977 to 2018. Because women and the college educated have historically led social transitions toward gender egalitarianism, we can better understand the dynamics of societal ideological shifts by tracking attitudinal convergence and divergence across different genders and educational groups.

Figure 1 displays net trends in U.S. gender attitudes across four well-studied survey items that facilitate long-term historical analysis: attitudes about women in politics, familial roles, relationships between working mothers and their children, and the impact of working motherhood on preschool children. The vertical axis displays the net predicted probability of egalitarian attitudes, with trends shown separately by gender and education. The predicted probabilities are taken from weighted logistic regression models with controls for age, gender, and education. Across all groups, support for gender equality declined in the mid-1990s, rebounded in the mid-2000s, and advanced more slowly in the past decade than before the “stall.” Results from the 2018 survey show recent increases in support for women in politics and dual familial roles, whereas support for working motherhood has not increased since the last survey wave. Notably, women’s support for women in politics jumped between 2016 and 2018 after two decades of minimal growth, which might have been inspired by the 2016 presidential election and the first ever nomination of a woman by a major political party.

Figure 1.

Historical trends in U.S. attitudes about four dimension of gender equality, by gender (on the left) and education (on the right). The connected points are estimates from weighted logistic regression models that include an interaction between survey year and either gender (for the models on the left) or education (for the models on the right). Models also include controls for age, education (in the gender model), and gender (in the education model). The shaded areas are 95 percent confidence intervals.

The gender gap in attitudes is consistently larger toward working motherhood than toward women’s political and familial roles. Men’s attitudes lag substantially behind women’s on the issue of mothers’ paid employment, and this gender division has not narrowed over time. Conversely, the gap between men’s and women’s attitudes toward familial roles is much smaller, and there is no gender gap on the issue of women in politics, which receives high levels of support from both genders.

The educational gap in gender egalitarianism is largest for the issue of familial roles, growing for working motherhood, and narrowing for women in politics. The narrowing educational gap for women in politics indicates that high levels of support have already saturated all social groups. However, we observe the largest educational gap on attitudes toward familial roles, with the college educated reporting consistently more egalitarian attitudes than the less educated. The educational gap in attitudes about working motherhood disappeared between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s and then expanded, with the college educated leading an egalitarian change. This is consistent with earlier findings that the rise of men’s “overwork” during this period, which was more prevalent among college-educated men, was linked to the stalled gender revolution (Shu and Meagher 2018); the attitudes of the college educated became more conservative during the mid-1990s, when men’s long working hours reinforced traditional divisions of household labor. When the prevalence of men’s overwork declined in the past decade, the college educated once again took the lead in adopting egalitarian gender attitudes, resulting in an expanding educational gap on attitudes toward working motherhood.

Overall, the narrowing educational gap and absence of a gender gap in attitudes toward women in politics, and the persistence of gender and educational gaps in attitudes toward familial roles and working motherhood reflect the endurance of “egalitarian essentialism” in U.S. culture, which endorses women’s equal rights in the public sphere while subjecting women to gender-specific expectations regarding caregiving and childcare (Cotter et al. 2011; Mason and Lu 1988; Pepin and Cotter 2018).

Attitudes toward women in politics and familial roles have larger educational gaps but smaller gender disparities, while attitudes about working motherhood have a large gender disparity and smaller educational gap. These discrepancies demonstrate an uneven transition in different dimensions of gender attitudes, which are driven by different forces. Findings suggest that men of all educational levels are attached more strongly to the ideology of “intensive mothering” (Hays 1998), although they are as egalitarian as women regarding women in politics and paid employment. Further research is needed to analyze why education and gender affect different gender attitudes disproportionally.

Supplemental Material

SRD851692_DS – Supplemental material for Trends in U.S. Gender Attitudes, 1977 to 2018: Gender and Educational Disparities

Supplemental material, SRD851692_DS for Trends in U.S. Gender Attitudes, 1977 to 2018: Gender and Educational Disparities by Kelsey D. Meagher and Xiaoling Shu in Socius