Two Decades of Gender-Role Attitude Change in Europe

Speaker: Mary C. Brinton, Reischauer Institute Professor of Sociology, Harvard University

This seminar explores the assumption of many cross-national studies that gender-role attitudes fall along a single continuum between traditional and egalitarian. Brinton analyzes over-time data from 18 European countries and identifies trajectories of attitudinal change. Brinton demonstrates that while traditional gender-role attitudes have precipitously and uniformly declined, European nations are not converging towards one dominant egalitarian model but instead are diverging across three distinct varieties of egalitarianism. 

Co-sponsored by the Women and Public Policy Program, Harvard Kennedy School