Authors
Summary
The attitudes of people about how paid and unpaid work should be divided between the members of a couple (gender role attitudes) determine the economic and social outcomes of women to a great extent. It is thus important to understand how the gender role attitudes of people are formed and evolve. In this paper, we concentrate on one of the most path breaking events in life: becoming a parent. Using rich longitudinal data from the UK and fixed-effects regressions, we first show that, in general, entry into parenthood significantly shifts the gender role attitudes of women toward more traditional positions, but leaves men unaffected. We then show that prenatal attitudes are crucial in driving the change in attitudes of new parents. We find a substantial traditionalization of gender role attitudes for new parents who had more progressive prenatal attitudes, with no distinction between the sexes. Conversely, no significant attitude change is observed for parents with more conservative prenatal attitudes after entering into parenthood. Novel moderating analyses also show that the traditionalization of attitudes for progressive individuals, after they become parents, becomes substantially stronger as the experience of (and exposure to) traditional postnatal arrangements in the division of paid and unpaid work increases.