Heather Sarsons, Vancouver School of Business

Measuring Gender Attitudes Toward Men and Women

Abstract

A large literature uses surveys to document a correlation between gender attitudes and gender inequality. These surveys typically measure attitudes toward women in traditional roles. Within a couple, the norms that men face may also matter when deciding how to split childcare, housework, and earning responsibilities. This paper uses standard survey measures of gender attitudes and adjusts them to elicit beliefs about men's roles in the household and labor market. We find that standard measures of gender attitudes do not adequately capture individuals' gender attitudes. Respondents also typically have less progressive views about men than about women. We construct measures of attitudes facing both men and women and correlate them with respondents' labor market and marriage decisions, as well as county-level labor force participation and voting patterns. We find that attitudes toward both men and women are correlated with within-household income and employment differences. In addition, male, but not female, attitudes are correlated with lower female labor force participation. Taken together, our results suggest that improving the norms that women face may not be enough to achieve household equity.

Heather Sarsons is an associate professor at the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia. She received her PhD from Harvard University.

Her research interests are labour, personnel, and behavioural economics and is particularly interested in understanding gender inequality and discrimination.

You can read more about Heather Sarsons here

CEBI contact: Ida Lykke Kristiansen & N. Meltem Daysal