Are we witnessing a backlash to the progress of gender equality around the world? New research reveals a growing gender gap in attitudes across a range of topics, particularly striking among younger generations. From polarized views on social issues to contrasting expectations regarding marriage and family, this divergence in outlook between genders points to deeper societal fissures.
Recorded on April 7, 2025, this panel brought together experts to discuss the contours and complexities of this “new gender gap” and explore its ramifications for politics, demography, and societal cohesion.
The recording features presentations by Xiaoling Shu, Professor of Sociology at UC Davis; and Rachel Bernhard, Associate Professor of Quantitative Political Science Research Methods at Nuffield College and the University of Oxford. Kiera Hudson, Assistant Professor in the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, moderated. (Note that Joshua R. Goldstein, Professor of Demography and Director of the Berkeley Population Center at UC Berkeley, also participated on the panel but declined to be recorded.)
Matrix On Point is a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public.
The panel was co-sponsored by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI), the UC Berkeley Department of Demography, the Berkeley Population Center, the Haas School of Business, and the Center for Research on Social Change.
Please listen to the recording of the event below or on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[WOMAN’S VOICE] The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.
CORI HAYDEN: Welcome to the Matrix. My name is Cori Hayden. I am a professor of anthropology here at Berkeley and the interim director of the Social Science Matrix for this semester, one of the campus’s better gigs because it’s so interesting, the things that happen at this table.
We’re really pleased to have this panel set up for you today on The New Gender Gap, really addressing questions of what seems to be an increasing binarization of the world along gender lines in terms of politics, economics, other things that our panelists will help us think about today in some very interesting ways.
Before I turn it to Kiera to get us going in a more substantive way, I just want to say a couple things, first of all to thank our co-sponsors for today’s event: the UC Berkeley Department of Demography, The Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative, Berkeley Population Center, Haas School of Business, and the Center for Research on Social Change.
I want to thank Marion Fourcade and Ambrosia Shapiro, who are not in this room today but who really did the organizational work of setting up this panel last semester. And our current staff, Sarah Harrington, Chuck Kapelke in the back, and Eva Seto for all the help in getting these events up and running and in preparing them to share with those who could not be here today by recording.
Let me now introduce our moderator, Kiera Hudson. Kiera is an assistant professor in the Haas School of Business here at Berkeley. Their research examines the ubiquitous nature of unequal social hierarchies in society and their role as a primary source of intergroup conflict.
By understanding the contextual and psychological processes that underpin how hierarchies are formed, maintained, and influenced by one another, Professor Hudson’s work really helps us develop some tools for changing hierarchical systems and promoting a more egalitarian world. Without further ado, let me turn it over to Kiera. And thank you all for being here. And thank you all so much for coming.
[APPLAUSE]
KIERA HUDSON: The reason why I think it’s funny that moderators get introduced because no one comes for the moderator. People come for the panelists. But I am really excited to moderate this conversation, in part because of my own background. So I am a social psychologist by training. And I think I was also raised in a particular environment where we said that there’s only three types of hierarchies: age, gender, and arbitrary set.
So gender is very foundational, at least from what I have been taught. And I think the idea that what we understand about gender is perhaps changing is a really cool idea, in part because what I think this panel is going to suggest is that some of our knowledge of how gender works might be changing in our current environment and really challenge us to think through our current theories about how identity and specifically gender operate, and what can we learn moving forward.
So we have three really amazing people who are going to share some of their work. And so just a quick overview of what we’re going to do today. So I’m going to shut up very soon.
Dr. Xiaoling Shu will present for another 10 minutes. And she is the professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California at the Davis. So clearly, we’re perhaps keeping it in the broader UC family. And her research focuses on the impacts of two of the most profound processes of our times, marketization and globalization, and their impact on gender inequalities as well as our subjective sense of well-being. So she studies family. She studies marriage. And she uses data science models, sort of on national and international data to carry out country-specific and cross-national analyses. And I think we’re going to hear some cross-country analyses today, which I’m really excited for.
And then last but not least, Dr. Rachel Bernhard will bring up the end of the panel. And she is an associate professor of quantitative political science research methods at the Nuffield College in the University of Oxford. So she came a very long way to give this or to be part of this panel. So we’re really excited. And she also got her PhD here at Berkeley but in political science. So again, keeping it within the family.
And she’s currently working on a book project on appearance-based discrimination and politics. And she teaches classes on political psychology, public policy, identity politics, et cetera. So we’re getting really phenomenal people across various parts of the social sciences to– I love how I’m leaning into this mic. But it’s not this mic at all that is projecting my voice.
Anyway, so they’re going to present for a collective 30 minutes. And then I’m going to lead a panel discussion, where we talk about some of the ideas that have come forth. Please think about your questions that you have for them because we’re going to wrap up in the last 20 minutes of our time today with audience Q&A. Any questions? This is new for me. So if you have questions, don’t be shy because I also don’t know. So we’ll figure it out together. So without further ado, please round of applause.
[APPLAUSE]
XIAOLING SHU: My talk has three parts, primarily based on my three lines of research. And I just extract all the graphs from some of my papers. So those were not intentional. I aimed to study gender gap. So I’m going to explain. So I put together this talk to give us some food for thought and also provide some background knowledge. Particularly, for example, I have the thoughts about fertility rates and how you change and why some of those information I’m going to provide to you are relevant.
So I studied gender ideology. And I think we need to take on a multi-dimensional view. And then the two most essential dimensions are hierarchical dimension and horizontal dimension. Of course, people argue about other dimensions.
So vertical equality and horizontal differentiation in terms of gender roles. So this is a map that I did and published just last December on the distribution of gender– these are the average on the two dimensions. And based on this, I also saw the vertical dimension and the horizontal dimension.
So based on these, I also identify four types of ideology as the liberal egalitarian, which are the Scandinavian, the Northwestern European countries. And then egalitarian essentialists are the rest of the Western countries. US is one of those.
And then at the right bottom side– and these are what I call– I had a hard time labeling this one. So I labeled it as a flexible traditionalist primarily are countries with a socialist legacy. And China is one of those. And then traditional socialist countries primarily are the predominantly Muslim majority countries. And more egalitarian are higher values. And the less egalitarian, the lower values.
So then you can characterize a gender attitude on two dimensions and then four types of ideology. So the next graph– I’m going to the table– I’m going to show you is huge. And no worries if you don’t see it you don’t see everything clearly. It’s just to demonstrate how I controlled all these other factors.
And so on the two dimensions, you remember the hierarchical, vertical dimensions and both showing a positive effect. So females, those are gender. So females are more egalitarian towards both gender equality and women’s dual roles.
And then the four types of ideology, I also showed that in terms of liberal egalitarianism, so women are 3.14 times more likely to hold that ideology than men. And then women are more than two times to fall into this type of ideology than men. And then lastly, women. So these are three types of non-traditional ideology. And all these three women are– so this is based on World Values Survey data of 47 countries that I published just in December last year. And so our conclusion seems like, oh, this is a universal. Seems like women are more supportive of egalitarian gender attitudes. So let’s look at the case of United States.
This one missing. In the United States, I used the data from General Social Survey and last four decades of data from 1977 to 2018. And so they always go together, the intersection of race and education. But I focus on gender. So if you look at the gender gap, gender gap in gender egalitarianism almost remain consistent during this entire period of four or five decades. So women significantly hold a higher or more egalitarian attitude than men.
So does that gender gap change based on other factors? So in another study, I identified one of the major factors that prompt a change in gender attitude is labor force gender equality measure, primarily measured as a gender earnings ratio plus a female labor force participation rate. So I combined those to construct a gender equality measure in the labor force.
And another factor would be percentage of men who were working. That comes to the compatibility of workers and family. And also, the perception of ideal workers in the workplace. So as labor force gender equality improves and racial gap shrink, educational gap shrink, not gender gap– so very stubborn.
And what about the other factor that I identified, a percentage of men overworking? Because when percentage of men were working in the labor force in the population, and then they would perceive women as not the materials cutoff for competition in the marketplace, less ideal workers, because women have family responsibilities. They cannot come up. They cannot respond to the demand of the workplace. So that’s how people perceive women in the workplace. And then there would be a decline in gender egalitarian. And that’s the argument of my paper.
And US, the percentage of men overworking increases. Racial gap– like a reverse flipped. And educational gap start to shrink, mainly because, at least during the period of my study, the most people who over work were college educated men. And then their decline is sharper than the rest of the population.
So on the other hand, gender gap– do you see any change. No. And does not budge at all. So this result, this persistent or stubborn gender gap with women leading in egalitarianism, is consistent with the findings from European countries. And so it indicates that structural reasons are insufficient and not powerful enough to initiate any change.
So one of the argument that I put forth probably is socialization and socialization. And in another paper, I also showed that a lot of times interest-based argument does not explain. And then many of them are the behavior and the belief of people. Rather, it’s a socialization. Socialization is much, much more powerful mechanism than interest.
And I’m going to show my study from China. So we thought initially that the argument is that the gender gap is going to be universal. But let’s look at the Chinese case.
And I studied, of course, a bunch of other attitudes. And the blue one is green. I didn’t have time to prepare a special graph for this purpose. So for all the different cohorts, you don’t see any gender gap except for the youngest cohorts aged 18 to 34 at the time of the study.
So I only show up among the youngest cohort. So that finding is not universal to all people of older generations. And then it also does not show up among people with less education, less than junior high. There’s some differences among senior high educated. But primarily would be the college educated, the gap is the largest. And then that explains lower marital rate among college-educated women because they cannot find men who think in the same way as they move away in the egalitarian direction.
And then this is the last one. I’m going to fly away. Last slide shows that this gender gap does not show up among the rural residents. Actually, my data from the early ’90s, rural women actually were more conservative in gender attitudes. These were the women who– most of the female child infant abuse were actually carried out by women themselves, by the midwives, by the relatives female relatives, and by the mothers sometimes.
But this is a progress actually. And when I look at this chart, I said, oh, this is a progress. Actually, rural women actually hold the same level of gender egalitarianism as rural men. And that’s already a progress because it used to be lower.
Only among the urban residents, there’s a gender gap in gender egalitarianism. And such a sharp gap among urban, college-educated, and youngest cohort– has profound impacts on many dimensions of life in the labor market and in marriage and family and the fertility behaviors. That’s it. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
KIERA HUDSON: OK. And last but not least, we have Dr. Rachel Bernard, who will be presenting without slides.
RACHEL BERNHARD: That’s right. The reason I’m presenting without slides is that I know it’s a diverse audience of people. And what I’m hoping is to keep my presentation short so that there’s more time for Q&A from the audience.
So where I want to start is by giving you a snapshot of where we are politically today. Overall, gender attitudes have liberalized in many countries over the decades. However, we are now seeing quite a course correction, especially among Gen Z, the youngest generation we have data for.
In the 2024 US election and a number of social science surveys that political scientists ran, we measured the largest ever gender gap in attitudes among Gen Z. So women were 38 percentage points more likely to vote for a Democrat and to express feminist attitudes. Young men, in contrast of Gen Z, were 13 percentage points more likely to vote for Donald Trump and Republicans and express more conservative attitudes.
If we contextualize this, what we see is that it looks very much like young men, after sort of peaking in gender liberalism among millennials, are now kind of declining back to where previous generations are, whereas women continue to liberalize. So the youngest generation of women are the most progressive or left-leaning generation of women on average. This is also not something that is just a function of US politics. So we see really similar trends in studies in the UK and Germany and in South Korea. And these are places with really different average levels of gender attitudes.
So South Korea– much more traditional, for instance. Germany tends to be more progressive even than the US. So we’re really seeing this kind of trend increasing conservatism on gender attitudes among young men and increasing progressivism or liberalism among young women.
So we have this stark new gender gap. What’s going on there? This is where we really have a knife fight within political science and other social sciences about exactly what’s happening. On the one hand, we can point to a sort of progress in women’s achievements very broadly.
So for instance, in the US case, we can see that women have become increasingly educated. Black women in particular have the highest rates of graduation from college per capita in the US. That’s an enormous change from where it was a few decades ago.
And so one could say, OK, maybe there’s sort of backlash against that. Josh spoke, for instance, about this perception that there’s now a problem for boys and young men. They’re being left behind. On the other hand, if we look at different metrics, we see a different story.
So the ratio of gendered labor earnings, for instance, has not changed in the US in about 35 years. So I can’t remember because it’s a sort of fictional sounding number the latest estimate of when we’re likely to get to gender parity in earnings in the US. But it’s something on the order of the year 2500. It is not sometime soon. And that is because progress has basically stalled. So women are getting more educated. But they are not earning more as a percentage relative to men.
Now, those trends do look a little bit different if we look at different countries around the world. It’s easy to point to, I think, different stories about exactly what’s going on there. A very popular story is one about backlash, that young men feel left behind,. And in particular, perhaps they’re being fed a series of narratives that this is because of feminism, this is because of women’s progress. And that depicts the world in a very zero-sum way. If girls do better, boys do worse.
There is also a lot of evidence that this is not just an attitudinal shift. So it’s not just something that people are saying sort of privately. But it doesn’t really affect their interactions.
There’s a lot of work within political science now on the rise of men’s rights groups, incels, various other sort of variants of this, many of whom advocate explicitly for violence against women, many of whom have been responsible for mass shootings, for instance, in the US. I’m sure a number of those incidents come to mind for you all.
This is, of course, not just a US phenomenon. Again, we see the exporting of these ideas and narratives around the world. Many of you may have read about the Tate brothers, for instance, in Romania, who have been some of the most popular influencers and sort of spreaders of these narratives. And we do see this reflected in other kinds of statistics.
So for instance, we’ve seen a dramatic increase over the last 10 years or so of practices like sexual strangulation in heterosexual sex, especially among young people. Part of that, of course, could be a difference in willingness to report this. If people don’t feel judged for it, they’re more likely to share that they’re doing it. And so we can’t say for sure that this is all just a function of attitudes among young people rather than no real changes in practice.
But it’s certainly not something where we just go, well, we can agree to disagree. It’s just attitudes. It’s just something that we have disagreement over. So I think, right now, political science very broadly is sort of circling a void, which is that we can see things have changed. We can see they’ve changed dramatically and quickly. We can see that they’ve changed around the world. And in some ways, that makes it more complicated for us to tell a story that this is just about the Tate brothers or this is just about Trump or this is just about some other factor.
So like my co-panelists in many ways, I also have a lot of questions about what’s happening, what’s responsible for this new gender gap. I have a lot of work across a lot of different topics in gender and politics, which I won’t inflict on you now. But I really hope that you’ll come with lots of questions, including sort of probing, difficult, provocative questions. Because in some ways, we social scientists have as many questions as I think you all do. And I’m excited to hear your thoughts. So thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
KIERA HUDSON: I invite all panelists to come back and sit up here. OK, so for the next– we’re doing beautifully on time. I’m so proud of all of us. So for the next 20 minutes, we’re going to have a discussion amongst the panelists because pretty much they all had a plea.
We do not know what’s going on. Let’s figure it out. And so I’m going to let the panelists talk. I have some thoughts myself. And then we’re going to have hopefully a very rich conversation. And then in the last 20 minutes of this event, we’re going to bring you into the conversation. At least that is our plan.
So like I said, I am a social psychologist by training. And so I had a lot of fun listening to all three of your presentations. And I think what I kept circling around a bit was the role of social roles in terms of men and women and whether or not what’s going on is a contextual thing.
So social roles work differently in different contexts. And so we’re in a different political space. We’re in a different country. And that’s what’s going on. Or is there something foundational about how gender works in terms of our evolutionary background about how these gender roles even came to be and our understandings of how men and women are supposed to be? And that is what is currently breaking down.
So for example, if you think about the history of marriage and why marriage is a thing, there was a time where women couldn’t do anything without a man. And that’s just not true. But it’s not true in deep ways.
Now, you can raise a child by yourself. And the social stigma around it is really reduced to the point where it might not even be prohibitive anymore. The idea that women can travel by themselves, and that’s now safer than ever.
And so the idea of what men and women were supposed to do as a unit, both in terms of marriage and whatnot, I’m wondering if our foundational understandings of gender is changing. Or is it the context? And you might not have an answer. Actually, you probably don’t have an answer.
But I am curious your musings around that. And hopefully, that’ll start to get at what pieces we should be thinking about on the table. And then we’ll go from there. So anybody can start. I’m not going to pick on you since you’re next to me. But if anyone has an intuition that they’ve been noodling on, I think we would all love to hear.
RACHEL BERNHARD: I think it’s hard for us to separate out the role and the context. I mean, you can see, for instance, from both Josh and Xiaoling’s work, that there are these feedback loops. One thing changes. A structural thing changes, for instance. And then our attitudes or ideas or the symbolism that we place on that changes. And then in turn, that makes it possible to imagine even more different structures. So I don’t have a sort of easy prefab answer on that.
What I do think is important to highlight in your question is how immensely these structures have changed. Now, they haven’t all changed universally everywhere. The ability of an unmarried woman to travel in rural India is very different than the ability of an unmarried woman to travel in the United States, though those differences in structures are not always universal across countries. The US might be more liberal or permissive on one dimension and not at all on another dimension.
But we see enormous shifts in terms of expectations about who does what about some of the biggest life decisions possible– having children, marrying, having partners, et cetera. So I do think– I mean, certainly, big changes on that, of course, are going to be matched by these big changes in attitudes that we see from a lot of these general social surveys. So I think it’s not surprising. But perhaps the speed at which some of this is changing is surprising.
XIAOLING SHU: I will follow up. So the gender roles are actually not intrinsic. They are socially prescribed and arose. So as I showed in, I think– my first graph says, for example, in Scandinavian countries and in the remaining rest countries, in terms of the countries that are ranked high on the vertical equality measure, so they see men and women are intrinsically equal. At least you don’t– unconditional.
But on the other hand, many of those countries with a socialist legacy, following the Marxist pathway, believing that women have to earn their equality through paid employment– so that’s why they promote a high female labor force participation at the same time without relieving them from domestic duties and responsibilities. So these are, again, prescribed roles that although they think women should contribute to participate in the labor force and can be loving mothers at the same time and expect them to contribute to household income– but at the same time, they don’t see women as deserving of equal rights and equal opportunities in the public sphere. So these are not intrinsically the roles.
And on the other hand, these roles also change based on other circumstances. And public policy would be one major impetus of change, the laws and regulations. And so now shrinking– at least in the ’60s and ’70s, shrinking gender gap in earnings would be a result of that and also change this definition of roles. And gender roles also change. And it’s also universal, that shifting and definition societal prescription of gender roles.
So for example, in Western countries, as we mentioned, that families can be of very diverse forms, can be a single parent family, can be a same sex family. But on the other hand, in many other parts of the word– for example, one of my book and chapter is on new feminism. So particularly in some Asian countries and also in some of the low fertility countries, like Italy and Spain and now South Korea and Hong Kong and Japan, these are countries emphasizing feminism.
And the fertility is closely connected with marriage. Marital birth are more legitimized than out-of-wedlock birth. So some of those low fertility is a result of lower marriage rates of these societies.
And China is the same way. And in many of those East Asian countries, out-of-wedlock fertility is less than 2% or 3%. But on the other hand, people’s attitude also changed. For example, in my survey data from 2017, in China, people’s acceptance of divorce and childless new forms and unconventional forms of family start to also increase.
So it works as Rachel mentioned and works both ways. They reinforce each other. And then the new structural change also change people’s perception. And perceptions push for new laws and regulations and the structural change.
RACHEL BERNHARD: Yeah, I just have a quick addition, which I think Xiaoling’s comments really brought out, which is that these changes do happen kind of in tandem. They correlate a lot but not perfectly. Sometimes, they lag. Sometimes, they lead.
I was thinking when you were talking about there’s this fantastic paper called “All The Single Ladies” by two economists, where they show that when women are sort of narrowly elected to the office of Mayor in Sweden versus narrowly losing. They’re much more likely to end up divorced at the end of their term.
And the reason they argue with, I think, some pretty persuasive data is that there’s a tension between taking on this sort of leadership role and expectations about their availability to do things like childcare. And the really fascinating thing is that they find this even though these women are not spending more hours at their job after becoming mayor because their working hours are pretty tightly constrained by labor regulations there.
So what you can see is this kind of mismatch of expectations to structures. Even though you have in many ways, an extremely egalitarian society, you don’t see, oh, yes, the attitudes have tracked that perfectly. And so when women are ahead, if you will, they’re chafing at the bit. They want to be able to have children by themselves, to freeze eggs, to do whatever they might be wanting to do.
And then they’re chafing at not having the permission or the legal structure or whatever to be able to do that. But then when they actually get ahead, when they’re leading rather than lagging, there’s often a sort of pushback or penalty, especially from men, though not always. Sometimes, it’s religion or partisanship or whatever that’s really dictating those attitudes. So I just wanted to pick up on those points.
KIERA HUDSON: Thank you all for answering that question. I really loved all of your answers. And as you were talking and I was reflecting, I kept thinking about what else almost needs to be added to the mix for us to have a clearer understanding. And so A, I’m curious what you think that is.
And just to give a bit of context, I am an intersectional scholar. And so I think, Xiaoling, you really brought in that this is happening in a particular subset of people. It’s not all folks in China but the more educated, et cetera. That’s kind of ironic, given that we think being more educated leads people to be more liberal.
But I was also thinking about, Rachel, some of your comments around like gender inequality versus equality and how, for example, the difference between what men and women make is very different if you’re talking about white people versus Black people. The gender gap is actually much smaller amongst Black folks.
And whether or not folks know that, it’s kind of an interesting dynamic thinking about what these roles are doing when you add in another identity. And so I’m curious about, in your work, what other identities have you found that really plays a big role in terms of fertility? When I think of people who are more educated, in my mind, they don’t have as many kids as people who are less educated.
So how does that then intersect with gender? And what other identities follow perhaps socioeconomic status? Thinking about politics and whether or not men within Gen Z– are there other differences from sexual orientation to race that are actually changing that widening gap? Is that just amongst white people, for example? I don’t know if you know the answer. But that was something I was curious if you all could speak to. And again, anybody can start. Get your questions ready.
RACHEL BERNHARD: Do you want to start, Xiaoling?
XIAOLING SHU: Well, yeah, I need some time to put things together. But I’m just putting things together where I’m probably a little bit disorganized. So other identity, the first one I come across because I explicitly chart that racial difference. And so among African-Americans, African-Americans are actually holding more egalitarian attitudes than whites. So that’s why the racial gap is shrinking. It’s because both white men and the White women’s egalitarian attitudes were further declining and because of some of the structural change. And that’s probably some people don’t– so that’s why in my abstract of that article, I said a racial gap with African-Americans leading is shrinking.
And also, in my studies in China that are rural residents and also our other identity, that’s very, very relevant. And the birth cohorts are also very relevant. And education as a proxy of social class is also very relevant.
And speaking of education, impact on fertility is quite tricky. And initially, highly educated people, they start to do– the fertility decline because they spend more time in investing in their education. And also, they tend to work longer times and then making money, busy making money.
But more recent studies have found that actually highly educated people have more resources relative to other groups of people. And so there is the so-called educational gradation both in marriage, because now they have a higher marriage rate, and both in terms of fertility. And they are turning to have actually higher fertility rates. So it’s quite interesting that if you study a longer period of time and you– some of the arguments, some of the factors you take for granted and start to reverse their effect over the trajectories of all those transformations. And I will stop here.
RACHEL BERNHARD: To your question about whether other identities play a role, yes, absolutely. Which identities those are depends a lot on what we’re interested in studying. So I have one working paper, for instance, that’s on wealth and gender in Congress. And we find that the women in Congress are much wealthier on average than the men in Congress. And they have– yeah, they need to make [INAUDIBLE].
And they in tandem also have– women in Congress have fewer children on average than men in Congress. We see that this has effects on their voting behavior but, again, differently for men and women. So the wealthier congressmen are, the more conservatively they tend to vote on economic issues.
But the wealthier Congress women are doesn’t seem to make so much of a difference. It’s not very predictive of how they vote. So a lot of these things are absolutely complicated and intersectional. If we think about basic voting attitudes, there in the US, at least, I mean, racial attitudes are an enormous predictor. It’s probably the strongest predictor, though decreasing in this last election, with gender kind of like following a little bit behind in terms of its predictive power.
We see a much smaller gap, for instance, among African-American voters by gender. So African-American women tend to be the most sort of left leaning or progressive voting bloc in the US. They’re at about 95% or 96% voting Democrat in the last election. Black men did decline but from about 91% to about 88% So that’s still a difference. The trend lines are still in the same direction. But that’s obviously a much smaller gap than this really enormous gap. Whereas we see among Latinos, for instance, they were a bit more similar to each other before. But they have a really enormous gap that’s emerging.
So yeah, I mean, again, depending on what sorts of outcomes or attitudes you’re interested in studying, the other factors that you have to take into account to understand the phenomena are hugely different. And I’m happy to expand on that more. It’s just we could look at all sorts of interesting stuff. We could look at religion. We could look at sexual orientation. There’s big, big differences on all of these variables.
KIERA HUDSON: So we can now open it up to Q&A. And I see someone is very ready. So there is a mic somewhere.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: OK. Hi, I’m Heather Haveman from sociology and the business school, just like Kiera, who’s in my group. And so, Rachel, I have a question for you. I was interested in the regression discontinuity analysis of people who just lost versus just won mayoral elections. And is it in Sweden?
RACHEL BERNHARD: Yeah.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: OK. So it’s something about becoming in a position of authority. It’s not necessarily about more hours worked. So you already showed or talked about how that was. That was not the answer.
So it’s like that men are egalitarian, even in the Nordic countries, we think of as the most socially egalitarian, their attitudes toward gender differences or gender roles. But when women get power, men are liking it. You could do the same analysis, a similar analysis, if you looked at women’s earnings versus men’s earnings.
And Josh, given that you’re– I think of you often as more of an economic demographer– is like you didn’t even talk about the gender gap in earnings and the sort of persistence in that over time. But I think this is really maybe a way to think about this. It’s not about, oh, it’s a more difficult job. It’s that you have power.
And the same thing happens when we see in terms of who does the housework. It’s actually a real paper titled that, than when women earn more, men do less housework than the women. They learn the same as women. And it’s like this, you can be equal, but you can’t be better, as I think part of what’s going on. But seeing it in Sweden is depressing.
RACHEL BERNHARD: Yeah, there’s a big literature, which I’m glad you spoke to about these various what happens when women get ahead. And we do– it depends a little bit on the analysis and the country in question. But we do often see this pattern that most countries, most sexes might express a desire for egalitarianism.
But if men are earning a little bit more or a bit more educated or whatever, everyone kind of goes, well, that’s fine. That’s how it is, whatever. But when women get a little bit ahead, everyone goes, now we’ve gone too far. So we do see that pattern.
We do also see, I mean, again, even in these really egalitarian contexts, there’s a bunch of work that looks at maternity and paternity leaves, for instance, again, looking in Sweden and Norway. And what they find is that there’s super strong social stigma against women cutting their maternity leave short. So they’re given about a year of maternity leave on average for each child.
And even among professors– I was chatting with a Swedish professor about this. I said, did you feel this? I mean, it’s one thing if there’s sort of stigma against coming back, if you’re lifting heavy bags or boxes onto a conveyor belt or something. But you sit and type papers.
And if you feel like you’re ready to go back after six months, why can’t you? And she said, I mean, I would be persona non grata in my department if I did that. And that’s even amongst– we think of this as the Holy Grail. Like, everything’s egalitarian. And everyone’s educated and wealthy. And they have options. And they have a year of maternity leave.
And people are still feeling that stigma, that pressure. And in turn, that has downstream effects. If you’re out of the labor force for a year, that has a much bigger impact on your productivity, which, again, we can disagree as individuals like, is that the one measure or thing we care about? Maybe not. Maybe we don’t care if we have two fewer papers this year or something because we’ve had a child. And that’s awesome.
But conversely, if we do care about that and we did want to return to work sooner, that is a pressure and a difficulty. Probably, Josh can speak to some of this as well. But yeah, there’s a really big literature that kind of finds when you shift the balance a little bit. It’s not just like, well, we’d all like to be 50/50. But it’s the same if the woman is at 55 or the man is at 55. There’s quite stark disparities often.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Claude Fischer from sociology. So the preface to my comment or question is just we should not underestimate how radical the change was over the last three generations. Around 1960, only 20% of women with young children were in the labor force. By the end of the century, it was a vast majority of women were in the labor force.
In fact, in terms of social policy, the expectation in the previous period was that women who worked with having children were bad. By the end of the century, women who did not work were bad. And then you had a tremendous influx of women into all these different occupations, everything from military to law to medicine to the academy.
This was a period of immensely radical change. And so my question is, if this panel had been held 30 years ago and people were seeing this change in process, would not the prediction of the social scientists at the time be, we are seeing the erasure of gender as a marker for success in life, for cultural differences, for everything other than what people voluntarily would like to be, gender wise? And I think that would be the prediction if this was 30 years ago because the structural things were changing so radically toward egalitarianism. Why are we not there?
RACHEL BERNHARD: I’ll start very briefly just with a personal anecdote, which is that I don’t think we even have to go back 30 or 35 years. I think even this narrative 10 years ago was, at least in political science, that there really was very heavy erasure and that most of the research was really focused on, what are the most efficacious ways to get there? How do we implement quotas? How do we shift earnings? It was very pragmatic, I think, just like how do we get the last little bit of the way there.
And so as a result, when I was getting my PhD, for instance, in studying gender and politics, my advisors, who are lovely people, who themselves study discrimination of various kinds, kept sort of gently turning to me and saying, don’t you think maybe it would be better if you said you studied something else? Wouldn’t it be better if you said you studied racial inequality or sexual orientation or something like that, where they’re going to still be real inequalities and people will hire you? I don’t know that they’ll really hire if you study gender.
And then sort of nice for me, horribly for everyone else, Hillary Clinton didn’t win the election. And then all of a sudden, everyone wanted to hire people who studied study gender and politics. But there was very much a story in political science at least that gender was like, why study this very marginal sort of thing that’s fading in importance when you could study something big and sexy and difficult that’s going to stick around? So yeah.
XIAOLING SHU: I think we are not there for two reasons. There might be other reasons. But I just want– I only have time to elaborate on two. First is the stubborn gender gap in gender attitudes that I showed you.
Half of the population are not there, are not in support of women’s equality. So that’s a reason. Another reason is that in terms of domestic work and child caring and the elderly caring, that’s not shared 50 to 50. And that burden on women also impacted the role they play, the investment , and the commitment in the public sphere.
And so they are perceived as not cut out for so-called ideal workers, dedicated workers, committed workers in the workplace. They are seen as a lesser of a leadership role and the employees in the labor force. So those are primarily the two reasons that I can think of. And I’m sure there are other explanations.
Oh, I forgot to add. The progress actually is not a linear one-directional progress. I studied the stalled gender revolution. So there was a whole decade from the mid 1990s to the mid 2000s. Americans and gender attitude actually declined and then rebounded back.
So 2004 was at the same level as 1994. So we lost a whole decade of progress. So we backtracked for a decade. So the progress is actually– in terms of historical period, progress is not one-directional.
And also, what I found is that the baby boomers are actually mostly gender egalitarian cohort. The younger cohort, when we measure them at the same age period compared with the baby boomers, they are not. They are lesser egalitarian in terms of gender compared with the Boomer generation. So it’s actually not that we are not moving there towards that direction yet.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hopefully, this will be quick. So you mentioned that there have been these– part of the global decline in fertility is people no longer entering into marriages potentially or no longer entering into partnerships that produce children. So something I’m curious about, if you’ve thought about or if you know of any research about, is if there is an observable difference in some of these social attitudes and ideologies between unpartnered men and unpartnered women versus partnered women and partnered men.
RACHEL BERNHARD: I’ll just respond very quickly. At least in terms of politics and voting, unmarried women are the furthest left. So if you look at married women, they’re further into the center. And then you have married men and then unmarried men.
And although that’s very stark right now, it is a similar pattern. If we look back 100 years ago, for instance, at early suffrage movements, it was often unmarried women who were driving hardest for this. And a lot of the arguments about suffrage basically said, well, why would we need to give women the vote because they’ll vote just the same as their husbands? And so it’s just it’s not doing anything. It’s just complicating our system.
And unmarried women existed. And so they argued that, yes well, we actually need the vote for ourselves as well. But yeah, you see that pattern across a lot of democracies over time.
XIAOLING SHU: Yeah, I don’t study that per se in the US society. My analysis was based on– particularly, my study of fertility is primarily from using data from China. So as I mentioned because of the government’s strong sanction, the sanction, and the strong control– initially the policy was not even issued household registration to children born out of wedlock. And that relaxed, which means that an out of wedlock child cannot even go to school, have no formal registration.
That changed. But still, egg freezing, it’s strongly sanctioned. Only married women can do that. And I’m married. And I cannot. And other technology assisted fertility or the fertility procedures are also heavily sanctioned on married women and can enjoy that privilege. And that’s why lots of women moved out overseas to receive treatment of unmarried women.
Actually, I was interviewed by Australian Broadcasting Corporation too on that topic. So unfortunately, because that group of people is so small, I cannot answer your question using any of the data.
RACHEL BERNHARD: Just to add briefly, it’s not China either. In the UK, for instance, you still cannot get NHS. So the health insurance system support for egg freezing or infertility unless you are in a married heterosexual couple.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: My question–
KIERA HUDSON: Last question.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Perfect, thank you. My question is, I’m curious to hear your guys’ thoughts on if this widening gap will kind of course correct with future generations. I guess how I would phrase it is, obviously, Gen Z holds typically more conservative views compared to millennials. I believe the children of millennials would be Gen Alpha.
Would you think that Gen Alpha would, similarly to Gen Z, go more to the right or follow kind of their parents’ point of view when it comes to where they are on the political spectrum and when Gen Z starts having kids, if they’ll follow their parents, being more conservative or how that would work? Because I think about it with gay marriage, for example, if you were to poll my parents’ generation on that, it would be much more disagreeable compared to if you polled where Gen Z stood on that. So how you think the future generations would compare to Millennial and Gen Z as their parents?
RACHEL BERNHARD: It’s hard to predict. I mean, social scientists were kind of wrong about all of our theories of all of these things. We’ve kind of showcased that for you.
And so in some sense, I wouldn’t put a lot of weight on my or anyone else’s predictions about this. Some of us will turn out to be right about things. Some will turn out to be wrong about things.
It’s hard to say a bit even if those who are right are right sort of just by chance or whether we really sort of saw down the pike, so to speak. I think, broadly, what we tend to see is sort of changes in patterns of how much these attitudes cluster or bundle together. So we see people now who might be very conservative on gender attitudes but very permissive with regard to sexual orientation.
And those things used to bundle more tightly together. So that makes it trickier to say. If everything moved in lockstep, then we could say, well, it might be difficult to change those attitudes. But once you change one, you might change everything.
Now, people can be sort of persuaded on one dimension. And it doesn’t really affect where they are on another dimension. So that’s a sort of long way of saying, I’m not sure we have any idea what will be happening in a generation or two.
XIAOLING SHU: I agree that in terms of gender attitude, I already mentioned, that the baby boomers so far is the most egalitarian. It’s actually declined, of course, different birth cohorts in terms of gender egalitarianism. But on the other hand, depending on which type of attitude you talk about, racial attitude, the younger generation are obviously more egalitarian than the older generation.
And then sexual attitudes probably in the same way. And I also study the Chinese different cohorts. And then that change is very dramatic. The younger generation are more egalitarian or more liberal or more nontraditional on almost all the dimensions, partly because China is going through a different phase of development than the US.
The West was towards the top or at the end of the development. And then China is still right in the middle. So that change is very dramatic. And then if I show you a chart of the cohort, it’s a very beautiful rising pattern.
But on the other hand, in the US, it’s all messed up. All the trajectories are sometimes on top of each other. Or even some of the lines are falling under older generation.
KIERA HUDSON: So we’re having a phenomenal conversation. But I feel bad. I have to cut it off. I don’t want to end on nothing, even though we might not. But I think this is a great opportunity for us to interrogate a lot of the assumptions that each of our fields have around gender and use this opportunity to really figure out what’s going on rather than, I don’t know, lamenting and throwing our hands up. So with that, please join me in thanking our panelists. And I hope you have a wonderful day.
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[WOMAN’S VOICE] Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.
