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Purpose. This chapter explored the effects of egalitarian gender attitudes and routine housework on subjective well-being among older adults in China.

Design/methodology/approach. Data were drawn from the Third Wave Survey on the Social Status of Women in China (2010). The sample included 1,260 older adults aged 63–95, consisted of 428 urban respondents and 832 rural respondents, among which included 638 men and 622 women. Stratified linear regression models were used to examine the effects of egalitarian gender attitudes and routine housework on subjective well-being among urban–rural and gender subsamples.

Findings. The results indicated that egalitarian gender attitudes were positively related to subjective well-being. Routine housework was still gendered work in both urban and rural places in China. Routine housework predicted better subjective well-being only among rural women. There were significant differences in egalitarian gender attitudes and the division of housework between urban and rural samples.

Originality/value. Gender egalitarian attitudes and the division of housework in China were patterned not only by genders but also by the urban–rural division. Different from previous studies, housework did not have influence on subjective well-beings, except a positive association among rural women in the sample.

Purpose – The current literature of housework division consistently finds positive consequences of an equitable division of housework (particularly for working women). This study looks to more fully explore the characteristics that predict an egalitarian division of housework.

Methodology – This study integrates three theoretical perspectives – relative resource theory, life course theory, and gender studies – and uses data from a nationally representative data set to investigate couples who divide household labor more evenly and compares them to more traditional couples where the woman performs most of the housework using multivariate and logistic regression.

Findings – This study finds that the more resources a spouse possesses, the more likely that spouse is to engage in housework equitably. From a life course perspective, findings show that the longer a woman waits to marry, the more likely she is to have an egalitarian marriage; and length of marriage is a positive predictor of an inegalitarian marriage. Stronger than any other factor in predicting an egalitarian relationship are men's and women's progressive gender ideologies.

Originality of paper – Past research on the division of housework has focused on how chores are sex-typed and divided between men and women, but little investigation has focused on those couples who practice a more egalitarian housework division. This study uniquely finds a clear and irrefutable link between progressive ideologies and egalitarianism, as well as a link between conservative ideologies and “inegalitarianism.”

The current study aims to examine couples' conjoint negotiation with a third party, testing the effects of asymmetrical contextual ambiguity, gender stereotypes' priming and egalitarianism. It predicted differences in the processes of decision making between egalitarian and traditional couples, reflected in choices of female or male negotiator.

Egalitarianism levels were measured by the Altrocchi and Crosby Marriage Questionnaire. The asymmetrical contextual ambiguity was manipulated through two newly constructed negotiation cases – one feminine‐stereotyped and the other masculine‐stereotyped, based on Miles and LaSalle. Priming of gender stereotypes was manipulated using two passages inducing explicit or implicit priming, based on Kray, Galinsky and Thompson. Primary statistical analysis was χ² test for equal proportions.

The hypotheses were by and large supported: as expected in all four experimental conditions, traditional couples chose men as their negotiator. By contrast, egalitarian couples tended to nominate their negotiator depending on the situation (feminine, masculine, and under implicit priming). In addition, under explicit priming their selection was in the predicted direction but not significant.

This study provides insights with respect to effective ways to conduct conjoint negotiations. In addition, it indicates the need to enhance women's negotiation self‐efficacy, so that they can become more active in negotiation processes.

The current study explored real‐life couples' conjoint negotiation with a third party, rather than examining couples' internal negotiation processes or individuals' dyadic negotiation, which prevailed in extant research. Future research should adopt the focus on genuine couples' conjoint negotiation, employed in this study.

This study explores the interplay between macro- and micro-level predictors of psychological well-being related to work and family. We use nations as the context and investigate how country-level gender equalities and gender norms affect individual well-being and its relationship to micro-level predictors.

Social role explanations suggest that women’s vulnerability in mental health is due to socially assigned gender roles and gendered socialization. We utilize multi-level modeling and data from the International Social Survey Programme 2002, to examine how the societal level gender climate impacts the effects of gender roles on psychological well-being for married and employed men and women in 33 countries.

Gender differences in mental health remain, but larger differences are observed in less egalitarian countries regarding gender. Also, caring roles are negatively associated with women’s psychological well-being to a greater degree than men’s, and the negative impacts are stronger in more egalitarian countries. Furthermore, men show lower well-being regarding work responsibility, but the gender effects are weaker in more egalitarian countries.

Our psychological well-being is affected not only by the actual role behaviors but also by how we each perceive these roles.

This study provides a broader picture of the relationship between gender and psychological well-being related to work and family. It also illustrates complex relationships between macro-level gender climate and individual-level psychological well-being and how structural differences may impact individual outcomes.

Since the 19th century, peace movements have consistently called on women to oppose war based on their roles as mothers and citizens. The women's rights and women's peace groups that participated in the anti-war movement of the 2000s continue this pattern drawing on both maternalist and egalitarian frames in their mobilizations. This chapter seeks to understand the forces that shape individual perceptions of the persuasiveness of these frames using face-to-face survey data collected at three 2004 demonstrations. The analyses show that different frames appeal to people with different levels of movement experience. The maternalism frame is negatively correlated with social movement experience and the egalitarian feminist frame is positively correlated. I extrapolate from this finding that that the maternalism frame may serve as a recruitment frame and that the egalitarian frame may serve as a retention frame. The conclusion theorizes that rather than thinking of women's groups that use different framing in oppositional contexts, it may be useful to think of the two sets of social movement organizations as working together in a symbiotic relationship that draws in new participants and maintains existing adherents through the use of distinctly different frames. This paper applies social movement framing theory in two unconventional ways: (1) it focuses on framing reception and the way that frames link individuals with organizations; (2) it encourages social movement scholars to think about the relationship between different frames within a broader movement and proposes an alternate conception of frame competition.

The purpose of this paper is to show how the interplay between individual women’s gender role attitudes, having young children at home, as well as the country-context characterized by gender egalitarianism and public childcare support, relates to women’s working hours in 23 European countries.

This study presents results of multilevel regression analyses of data from the European Social Survey (Round 2). These micro-level data on 23 European countries were combined with country-level measures on gender traditionalism and childcare expenditure.

The authors found that the negative association between having young children at home and women’s working hours is stronger for women with traditional gender role attitudes compared to women with egalitarian attitudes. The gap in working hours between women with and without young children at home was smaller in countries in which the population holds egalitarian gender role attitudes and in countries with extensive public childcare support. Furthermore, it was found that the gap in employment hours between mothers with traditional or egalitarian attitudes was largest in countries with limited public childcare support.

Policy makers should take note that women’s employment decisions are not dependent on human capital and household-composition factors alone, but that gender role attitudes matter as well. The authors could not find evidence of the inequality in employment between women with different gender role attitudes being exacerbated in association with childcare support.

The originality of this study lies in the combined (rather than separate) analysis of how countries’ social policies (childcare services) and countries’ attitudes (gender traditionalism) interact with individual gender role attitudes to shape cross-national variation in women’s working hours.

It was not until the late 1960s that housing attracted much attention from academic social scientists. Since that time the literature has expanded widely and diversified, establishing housing with a specialised status in economics, sociology, politics, and in related subjects. As we would expect, the new literature covers a technical, statistical, theoretical, ideological, and historical range. Housing studies have not been conceived and interpreted in a monolithic way, with generally accepted concepts and principles, or with uniformly fixed and precise methodological approaches. Instead, some studies have been derived selectively from diverse bases in conventional theories in economics or sociology, or politics. Others have their origins in less conventional social theory, including neo‐Marxist theory which has had a wider intellectual following in the modern democracies since the mid‐1970s. With all this diversity, and in a context where ideological positions compete, housing studies have consequently left in their wake some significant controversies and some gaps in evaluative perspective. In short, the new housing intellectuals have written from personal commitments to particular cognitive, theoretical, ideological, and national positions and experiences. This present piece of writing takes up the two main themes which have emerged in the recent literature. These themes are first, questions relating to building and developing housing theory, and, second, the issue of how we are to conceptualise housing and relate it to policy studies. We shall be arguing that the two themes are closely related: in order to create a useful housing theory we must have awareness and understanding of housing practice and the nature of housing.

This paper aims to investigate how organizational structure (i.e. centralized hierarchical vs decentralized egalitarian decision-making) can color leadership evaluations of equivalently positioned men and women independent of their actual leadership style. This study addresses three questions: Are men’s leadership abilities, in terms of competence, dominance and interpersonal skills, evaluated more positively than women when they lead a hierarchical company? Are men and women’s leadership abilities evaluated similarly when they lead an egalitarian company? Do organizational outcomes change these effects?

The research performs an eight-condition online vignette experiment on American community college students.

The findings suggest that organizational structure and outcomes influence how male versus female leaders are perceived. When leading a hierarchical company, male leaders not only gain more in perceived leadership ability when their company succeeds but are also less likely to lose legitimacy when their company fails. When leading successful egalitarian organizations, men and women’s leadership skills are thought to gain similar legitimacy, but when an egalitarian organization fails, perceptions of female leaders’ competence, status dominance and interpersonal skills drop more than those of men.

This study’s generalizablity is limited given the sample of participants and the context of the industry utilized in the vignette.

This study suggests that women’s promotion into leadership can be impeded by the decision-making structure of the organizations they lead independent of their individual choice in management style. Women leaders face not only disadvantaged evaluations of their leadership abilities in hierarchical organizations but are also not unilaterally advantaged in egalitarian organizations.

This paper highlights the need to theoretically examine how organizational structures fundamentally embed gender stereotypes.

This study asks the following research question: does “city” context interact with gender and gender egalitarianism (GE) to impact the positive (WFPOS – work–family positive spillover) and negative (WFC - work-family conflict) aspects of the work–family (WF) interface of working men and women in India.

MANCOVA analysis is used to examine data gathered from 250+ working men and women from eight different Indian cities that were ranked based on the 2018 Ease of Living (EOL) Index.

There was no significant main effect of gender on WF interface variables. Low levels of GE and low EOL were significantly associated with high levels of WFC and WFPOS. There was a significant interaction between gender, GE and city. An examination of within-gender differences indicated that in low-EOL cities, men and women with low values of GE (traditionals) had significantly higher time-based WFC than men and women with high values of GE (egalitarians). Additionally, traditional women reported higher WFPOS than egalitarian women. In high-EOL cities, traditional men reported significantly higher time-based WFC than egalitarian men. There were no significant differences between women.

Gender, along with gender-related attitudinal and contextual variables, does a better job of explaining variance in the WF interface as compared to gender alone. Results support the notion that high WFPOS and high WFC can co-occur in contexts of change and transition such as rapidly growing urban centers.

The results have significance for work–family practitioners as well as urban city planners looking to improve the quality of work–life in India and other similar emerging market economies experiencing rapid urbanization.

The study extends work–family research by bringing aspects of urban planning and gender studies into an understanding of the work–family interface.

Research on gender attitudes has consistently found that younger generations have more gender egalitarian views than older generations. Less attention, however, has been directed toward examining whether the generation gap has grown or shrunk over time and whether it differs across dimensions of gender attitudes. Using data from the General Social Survey for years 1977–2018,the authors examine the generational gap in gender attitudes across three components: views toward women in leadership, working mothers, and the gendered division of family labor between public and private spheres. The results show that differences between generations vary significantly across these dimensions. Attitudes have converged over time in support for women’s leadership, yet Baby Boomers espouse slightly higher levels of support than other generations, including the younger Generation Xers and Millennials. In contrast, consistent generation gaps are observed in support for working mothers, where younger generations hold more supportive views than respective older generations. Attitudes toward the gendered division of public/private sphere labor have converged between Millennials, Generation Xers, and Baby Boomers, with only Pre-Baby Boomers holding significantly more traditional views. Collectively, these trends highlight how cultural change through cohort replacement does not uniformly advance gender egalitarian ideologies. Instead, these shifts vary across specific dimensions of gender attitudes.