Conflicting Family Values and Employment Arrangements: The Role of Gender Ideology

Despite declining traditional gender orientations, the erosion of the male-breadwinner model, and the implementation of policies to foster the compatibility of family and work for men and women, gendered spheres of care and providing still exist: Women are less integrated into the labor market, and men are less integrated into private spheres. These inequalities are accompanied by competing gender ideologies around family orientations, like gendered employment arrangements and child-centering. Multidimensional ambivalent gender ideologies occur, which, for example, mix egalitarian positions of joint spheres of labor with essentialist beliefs of parenting responsibilities. In this study, we address whether and how gender ideologies influence gendered employment arrangements and who can realize an arrangement matching their gender ideology. Our study combines several strands of literature, such as second demographic transition, gender ideology, and social integration, to explain gender differences in employment arrangements.

We use the German Social Cohesion Panel (SCP) for 2022/23 and focus on both partners in heterosexual unions aged 18 to 67. We employ latent class analyses to identify multidimensional gender ideology classes. In the second step, we use gendered employment arrangements as a dependent variable and estimate multinomial logistic regression models with the predicted gender ideology classes as the primary explanatory variable while controlling for socio-demographics.

Preliminary results show that next to egalitarian and (moderate) traditional gender ideologies, ambivalent gender orientations exist. Dual-earner arrangements are more likely for egalitarian persons, an effect mainly driven by women, and single-earner arrangements are more likely for child-centered men and women. Gendered employment arrangements depend on gender ideologies. Further, we will investigate how mismatches in family orientations between partners influence gendered employment arrangements. We discuss how these findings contribute to differences in the social integration of men and women and how ambivalent gender ideologies can be understood as drivers of persistent gender inequality.