Gender Equality in the 21st Century: Country-Level and Individual-Level Factors Related to Women’s and Men’s Intentions to Contribute to Childcare – A Cross-National Comparison across 49 Countries

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Carolin Schuster
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: from 2021 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 456737081

• Final Report Year: 2025

Final Report Abstract

This project aimed to contribute to understanding gender inequality worldwide by gaining insights into factors that may deter men from participating actively in unpaid care work and women from participating actively in the labor market. Promoting a more equal distribution of unpaid care work will benefit both men and women, as well as their children. This project aimed to provide much-needed insights into the relationships between policies, culture, norms, and personal beliefs in a broad range of countries. In this project, data were used that were collected in 49 countries, including countries that are underrepresented in psychological research. In sum, the work in this project (so far) has resulted in three articles. In the first article, Olsson et al. (2023) addressed factors that contribute to the persisting inequality of gender-based division of unpaid care work (i.e., psychological factors, national policies and the broader sociocultural context). In sum, the findings across 37 countries show that the broader political and sociocultural context relates to the gender gap in intended uptake of parental leave, over and above individual-level gender attitudes and that merely offering both women and men the opportunity to take leave is not an effective way to promote caretaking intentions in men. In the second article, Schindler et al. (2024) examined the relationship between parental leave policies and the perception of social norms for the gender division of childcare. Analyses of data across 48 countries confirmed the predictions and suggest that paternity leave policies shape social norms. Both descriptive and prescriptive norms of equal division of childcare were stronger in countries in which parental leave was available compared to countries were no parental leave was available. Using data from 15 countries, in the third article, Saxler et al. (2024) investigated whether descriptive and prescriptive gender norms concerning unpaid domestic work changed after the onset of the COVID- 19 pandemic. Results showed that descriptive norms about unpaid domestic work have been affected by the pandemic, with participants seeing mothers’ relative to fathers’ share of housework and childcare as even larger. This study documents a shift in descriptive norms emphasizing the additional challenges that mothers face during health-related crises.

Publications

• The Gender Gap in the Care Economy is Larger in Highly Developed Countries: Socio-cultural Explanations for Paradoxical Findings. Center for Open Science.
  Block, Katharina; Olsson, Maria I. T.; Schmader, Toni; van Laar, Colette; Martiny, Sarah E.; Schuster, Carolin; Van Grootel, Sanne; Meeussen, Loes & Croft, Alyssa
  
• Gender Gap in Parental Leave Intentions: Evidence from 37 Countries. Political Psychology, 44(6), 1163-1192.
  Olsson, Maria I. T.; van Grootel, Sanne; Block, Katharina; Schuster, Carolin; Meeussen, Loes; Van Laar, Colette; Schmader, Toni; Croft, Alyssa; Sun, Molly Shuyi; Ainsaar, Mare; Aarntzen, Lianne; Adamus, Magdalena; Anderson, Joel; Atkinson, Ciara; Avicenna, Mohamad; Bąbel, Przemysław; Barth, Markus; Benson‐Greenwald, Tessa M.; Maloku, Edona ... & Martiny, Sarah E.
  
• Did Descriptive and Prescriptive Norms About Gender Equality at Home Change During the COVID-19 Pandemic? A Cross-National Investigation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 51(9), 1745-1759.
  Saxler, Franziska Magdalena; Dorrough, Angela R.; Froehlich, Laura; Block, Katharina; Croft, Alyssa; Meeussen, Loes; Olsson, Maria I. T.; Schmader, Toni; Schuster, Carolin; van Grootel, Sanne; Van Laar, Colette; Atkinson, Ciara; Benson-Greenwald, Tessa; Birneanu, Andreea; Cavojova, Vladimira; Cheryan, Sapna; Lee, Kai Chung Albert; Danyliuk, Ivan; Dar-Nimrod, Ilan ... & Martiny, Sarah E.
  
• Policy as normative influence? On the relationship between parental leave policy and social norms in gender division of childcare across 48 countries. British Journal of Social Psychology, 64(2).
  Schindler, Simon; Schuster, Carolin; Olsson, Maria I. T.; Froehlich, Laura; Hübner, Ann‐Kathrin; Block, Katharina; Van Laar, Colette; Schmader, Toni; Meeussen, Loes; van Grootel, Sanne; Croft, Alyssa; Sun, Molly Shuyi; Ainsaar, Mare; Aarntzen, Lianne; Adamus, Magdalena; Anderson, Joel; Atkinson, Ciara; Avicenna, Mohamad; Bąbel, Przemysław ... & Martiny, Sarah E.