Project Background
Increasing equality between women and men represents one of the greatest change processes of our time. From the 1970s, increasing support for equality was seen in a number of countries, and this was long assumed to be a linear development. However, in the mid-1990s, signs of flattening and stagnation emerged, as well as a tendency for less support for equality in the family than in working life and politics. Studies in many countries have shown that attitudes towards equal roles in the family and working life cannot be placed along a single axis from traditional to equal, but rather constitute different configurations of intersecting dimensions. Exactly which and how many "classes" or "groups" of attitudes are found varies with which countries and which attitude questions are included in the analyses, but all studies find several ambivalent/multidimensional positions in addition to unambiguously equal and traditional positions. Central to ambivalent and traditional positions are essentialist perceptions of gender – that women and men are fundamentally different by nature and therefore suited to perform different tasks. The analyses are typically based on questions asked in large international sample surveys.
Project Aim
The aim of the project is to gain better knowledge about the prevalence of essentialist understandings of gender in Norway today, how this varies between different population groups, and with which questions are used to measure essentialist perceptions of gender. Furthermore, the project will provide knowledge about how essentialist understandings of gender are related to support for equality in family life, working life, and politics.
Project Approach
The research questions are investigated through analyses of the survey CORE SURVEY 2022 - Gender Equality Survey, where the support for the idea that men and women are different by nature is measured using other questions than those used in many international studies. The survey also contains questions about attitudes towards equality in various areas, such as family, work life, politics, and education.
