Changes in Gender Role Attitudes Following Couples’ Residential Relocations

Sergi Vidal , Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics (CED), Universitat de Barcelona
Philipp M. Lersch, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

Residential relocations of couple households are associated with increases in objective gender inequality within families in paid and unpaid work. Little is known on how couples’ relocations impact on subjective outcomes such as attitudes. We examine whether gender role attitudes change when families move residentially, addressing potential explanations and assessing heterogeneity in outcomes by relocation distance and relocation motive. We use fixed-effects regression on a representative sample of 3,949 partnered women and 3,721 partnered men from the British Household Panel Study (1991-2007). Our results show that couple relocations shift individuals’ gender role attitudes modestly and only under particular conditions. While women’s gender role attitudes turn less egalitarian with repeated relocations and when couples relocate for job reasons, men’s gender role attitudes turn more egalitarian when couples exclusively relocate for the job of the female partner. We find that home and residential environments partly mediate women’s shifts to less egalitarian attitudes.

See paper

 Presented in Session 151. Gender and Migration