TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Grinza, Elena
AU  - Devicienti, Francesco
AU  - Rossi, Mariacristina
AU  - Vannoni, Davide
        TI  - How Entry into Parenthood Shapes Gender Role Attitudes: New Evidence from Longitudinal UK Data
        PY  - 2017/Oct/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 11088
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp11088
        AB  - Attitudes of women and men about how paid and unpaid work should be divided in the couple largely determine women's earnings and career prospects. Hence, it is important to understand how people's gender role attitudes are formed and evolve over the lifetime. In this paper, we concentrate on one of the most path-breaking events in life: becoming a parent. Using longitudinal panel data for the UK, we first show that, in general, entry into parenthood significantly shifts women's attitudes toward more conservative views, while leaving men unaffected. We also show that the impact on women emerges only after some time from the childbirth, suggesting that attitudes change relatively slowly over time and do not react immediately after becoming a parent.
Finally, we show that the impact gets large and strongly significant for women and men whose prenatal attitudes were progressive. In particular, we find that the change in attitudes for such individuals increases as the postnatal arrangements are more likely to be traditional. Overall, these findings suggest that the change in attitudes is mainly driven by the emergence of a cognitive dissonance. Broad policy implications are drawn.
        KW  - gender equality
KW  - gender role attitudes
KW  - entry into parenthood
KW  - cognitive dissonance
KW  - changes in the hormonal production
KW  - Understanding Society (US) data set
        ER  -