Abstract
The existing literature simplifies the measure of gender-role attitudes into a single liberal-conservative scale, whether aggregating multiple statements or using only one statement on specialized roles for the two genders, “A man’s job is to earn money and a woman’s job is to look after the home and family.” Typically, a respondent occupies one position along the continuum. However, role expectations for the two genders can be more complex. Using data from four East Asian societies—China, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea—in an international survey titled “Family and Changing Gender Roles,” this study explored four dimensions of gender-role expectations (male breadwinner, female income earner, male homemaker, and female homemaker roles) in addition to the typical global measure of gender roles. The findings show distinctive combinations of the attitudes toward the four dimensions by the society, shedding rich insights on belief systems of the four nations. These observed cross-cultural variations attest that reducing gender-role norms to a single liberal-conservative scale can lead to a misleading conclusion.
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Lee, YJ. (2017). Multiple Dimensions of Gender-Role Attitudes: Diverse Patterns Among Four East-Asian Societies. In: Tsai, MC., Chen, Wc. (eds) Family, Work and Wellbeing in Asia. Quality of Life in Asia, vol 9. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4313-0_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4313-0_4
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