The Global Development of Egalitarian Beliefs—A Decomposition of Trends in the Nature and Structure of Gender Ideology

Abstract

This research investigates aggregate change in gender attitudes from the mid-1990s to the mid2000s for an unbalanced panel of 75 countries representing over 70 percent of the world’s people. The use of modern techniques of factor analysis suggests that gender belief systems exhibit a high degree of uniformity across countries and have been converging around a decidedly postmodern ideological structure in recent years. Multi-level models confirm that the individual-level correlates of gender attitudes developed in the study of wealthy, Western countries are similarly predictive of attitudes in worldwide models. Regression decompositions find that cohort effects, with recent birth cohorts espousing more progressive beliefs about the extra-familial role of women than earlier-born cohorts, are a near-universal source of secular change in gender attitudes and are robust to the introduction of individual and country-level control variables. Global Development of Egalitarian Beliefs 4