Differences in Attitudes towards Gender Roles within and between the Countries of the Western Balkans

Abstract

Objective gender inequality can be measured in many dimensions, as Katalin Fábián pointed out in Chapter 2 — so too can subjective attitudes regarding gender inequality. Furthermore, it is reasonable to expect various relationships between objective inequalities and subjective attitudes toward inequalities. On the one hand, we may suspect that subjective attitudes tend to conform to objective inequalities, either because attitudes and norms may have guided objective practices and outcomes or because such attitudes and norms have been accommodated to objective practices and outcomes. On the basis of this line of reasoning, Fábián concludes, among other things:

If we wish to balance income indicators of gender with other meaningful and important aspects of the gender relations, the composite indices would need to pay more attention to the various types of representation in post-communist societies to include qualitative measures, such as attitudes (for example, towards women’s work in the labor force and household).