Gradational gender identification, work and care practices and mental wellbeing across European gender regimes

• Applicant: Professorin Pia Sophia Schober, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 576272384

Despite active gender equality policies in many countries, gender remains a defining feature of societies and individual lives across rich countries with persistent differences between men and women inter alias in time allocations, economic and mental wellbeing. To-date, most research has focused on investigating differences between men and women. However, binary measures of individuals’ sex or self-reported gender category underestimate the amount of variation in gender identities and are at odds with more nuanced, multidimensional concepts of gender in contemporary sociology and psychology. This project proposal argues that more nuanced self-categorisation measures of gender identity are important to fill a gap in directly measuring gender identity and to complement domain-specific measures of gender-related beliefs. Building on a small number of non-representative studies (Kachel, Steffens and Niedlich 2016; Magliozzi, Saperstein and Westbrook 2016), this project will extend evidence on the gender identity self-categorisation approach by exploring the potentials and pitfalls of gradational self-ratings of masculinity and femininity using representative cross-sectional data from 35 European countries as well as panel data from the UK and Germany, including also a priming experiment and open-ended questions. First, this project will exploit the substantial variation in institutional gender structures across Europe and explore biological, interactional and institutional influences on gradational gender identities across over 200 regions in 35 European countries based on data from the European Social Survey 2023 (ESS). Second, to better understand what contents different groups of respondents consider in their gradational gender identification, we will investigate correlations with daily practices, bodily and personality experiences across Europe and free text associations in the German GESIS Panel.pop Population Sample study. Third, a priming experiment in the German GESIS Panel.pop will examine whether emphasizing historical variation in sex and gender categorizations can reduce sorting into polarized gender identification categories. To advance our understanding of the explanatory potential of gradational measures of gender identification, the fourth part will investigate associations with changes in paid and unpaid work and in subjective wellbeing across the transition to parenthood using data from two representative panel studies in the UK and Germany in addition to a cross-sectional comparison across European gender regimes. In combination, the four project components aim at exploring how more gradational conceptualisation and operationalisation of gender identity contribute to more nuanced descriptions and explanations of causes and consequences of gender diversity in quantitative social sciences while also investigating methodological pitfalls using representative data from several European countries.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants