Gender Differences in Sex-Role Attitudes: A Topic Without a Future?

Abstract

Will gender still be a significant variable for analyzing attitudes, opinions, and values in Western industrialized countries in the year 2000? Or will structural and individual changes towards the equality of men and women in these societies make such analyses superfluous? This chapter analyses the present state of gender differences in sex-role attitudes using Eurobar-ometer data, data from the World Value Study conducted in 1981, and Argentinian data from 1988. These analyses demonstrate that there are sizeable gender differences in the attitudes towards the role of men and women in the families, in the workplace, in politics, and in the sexual domain. But they also show that the gender differences found in these surveys are a function of (a) the year in which the survey was conducted, and (b) the nation that was studied. These differences show dramatic changes over time, and when we move from economically less developed to more developed societies. These finding suggest that the size of gender differences are declining over time, and that future research on gender differences in political and social attitudes may have a different focus from the one it has today.