Conferences

Attitudes towards the appropriate role for men and women have changed in all European countries during last decades. Everywhere in Europe people share more equalitarian values now, as compared to fifty years ago. There are two main theoretical frameworks which try to explain changes in gender attitudes, one stressing the effect of cultural change (Inglehart, Norris, Welzel, 2002; Inglehart & Norris, 2003) and the second emphasizing the role of economic and technological development (Wilensky, 2002) on support for gender equality. The cultural approach considers the shift towards more gender equality as part of a broad cultural change, while the economic approach allots the transformation to the increased demand for female labor force in industrial and post-industrial societies. According to the first approach, changes in gender beliefs occur mainly as result of cohort replacement, younger cohorts socialized in a more equalitarian culture replacing the older ones. The second theory emphasizes the role of economic and institutional context on gender attitudes’ variation.

Romania, as other communist countries, has registered higher level of women’s participation on the labour market and an increased support for gender equality on the labour market in the beginning of the 90’s. However, the gender ideology was rather a traditional one, because communist regimes have introduced progressive ideology of gender equality in very traditional cultures (Hanson, Wells-Dang, 2006). While the higher support for women’s participation on the labour market was the result of full time employment policy, practiced by the communist regime, gender ideology reflects the level of social and economic development since the state did not intervene in issues related to the private area. Transition to market economy produced an economic decline and increased the unemployment rate. In the same time, the generous public childcare system existing during the communist time disappeared. These processes are likely to determine a trend towards less equalitarian gender beliefs.

This paper focuses on the dynamic of gender beliefs in Romania, during the last 15 years, analysing the variation in attitudes towards women involvement on the labour market and in gender ideology. We expect to find a significant return to more traditional gender ideology, as well as a decrease in support for women employment outside home, which are mainly the effect of contextual factors (higher unemployment rate and lack of coherent family policy). The analysis will employ standard cohort decomposition of social change methods, using European Values Survey data from three different waves (1993, 1999, 2008) which allow longitudinal comparisons.