Religiosity, gender attitudes and women’s labour market participation and fertility decisions in Europe
Abstract
The Second Demographic Transition (SDT) theory underlines the importance of changing values and attitudes to explain the trend toward low fertility and raising female labour market participation. We contribute to this debate comparing religiosity and gender attitudes over several European countries using three waves of the European Values Study (1990, 1999 and 2008). By dealing with the issues of measurement invariance and endogeneity between values and behaviour, our results support some critiques of the SDT theory. The pace of the process of sociocultural change has not been the same across European countries and the forerunners of the SDT, that is, the most secularized and gender-egalitarian societies, now have the highest female labour market participation rates and the highest fertility. We provide evidence for a ‘macro–micro paradox’ regarding the role of values on family behaviours. Religiosity is positively correlated with fertility and housewifery, while gender attitudes are only correlated with women’s labour market decisions. These correlations are stronger in more traditional countries, even if aggregate fertility is lower. We stress the necessity to integrate cultural and structural explanations, suggesting the lack of family policies and the rigidity of the family formation process as possible mechanisms to unravel this paradox.
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Biographies
Raffaele Guetto obtained his PhD in Sociology and Social Research from Trento University, Italy, where he works as a Research Fellow. His main interests include structural and cultural determinants of female labour market participation and fertility, values, welfare and labour market studies, social stratification.
Ruud Luijkx is associate professor of sociology at the Department of Sociology, Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He has contributed to international benchmark studies on social mobility and published further in the field of (educational) heterogamy, social inequality, career mobility, labour market transitions and loglinear and latent class analysis. Recently his focus has shifted partly towards research on values, norms, beliefs and voluntary associations and he is currently also data director of the European Values Study.
Stefani Scherer (Dr Phil., Mannheim University, Germany) is associate professor in Sociology at Trento University, Italy, where she teaches quantitative methods on the BA, MA and PhD level and a course on sociology of the family. She is working on social inequalities in international comparison, the analysis of life courses, and family and labour market dynamics.
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Article first published online: March 5, 2015
Issue published: May 2015
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