Abstract
Cross-national research on support of traditional female roles is scarce. This research fills this knowledge gap by studying 32 countries around the world, to provide insight into categories that support or reject traditional female roles. We test individual and contextual explanations for differences in the support of traditional female roles within and between countries as well as between men and women. We find that the differences between individuals are larger than between countries. We explain the differences with a combination of individual and contextual characteristics. Higher educated, employed people and those who do not adhere to a religion are the least supportive of traditional female roles. It turns out that people living under a dual earner family policy model support traditional female roles least strongly. Furthermore, we do not find the gender gap to be significantly different in countries with a dual-earner family policy model as compared to traditional countries, but we do find smaller gender differences in countries with other family policy models.
