Can Education Reduce Traditional Gender Role Attitudes?

Noelia Rivera Garrido

The purpose of this paper is to identify if there is a causal relationship between education and traditional gender-role attitudes. In particular, if women have to leave the labor market to takecareofthefamily,andifmenhavemorerightstoajobthanwomenwhenjobsarescarce. In addition, I explore plausible mechanisms through which education affects these attitudes. I use data from the European Social Survey for 14 European countries. My identi?cation strategy exploits educational reforms changing the number of years of compulsory education to obtain a source of exogenous variation that can be used as an instrument for education. The ?rst stage results show that education reforms certainly increase years of schooling, but only for individuals from a low-educated family, in particular women. Results indicate that for this group, one additional year of education signi?cantly reduces the probability of agreeing with women’s traditional gender role in more than 11 percentage points.

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 Presented in Session 8. Economy, Labor Force, Education, & Inequality