Gender in the 90s: Change in Beliefs about Gender in the U.S.

Kristen S. Lee, University at Buffalo, State University of New York (SUNY)
Paula Tufis, Research Institute for Quality Life, Bucharest
Duane Alwin, Pennsylvania State University

This research examines change in beliefs about women’s political and social roles from 1974 to 2006 using the General Social Survey. Previous research has found that trends toward increasingly egalitarian beliefs in the population began to level-off in the early 1990s. This research focuses in particular on the period from 1994 to 2006, examining how processes of cohort replacement and intra-cohort change contributed to social change in beliefs during this time. In a linear decomposition of change analysis, it is found that the fluctuating gender belief trends in the 1990s may be attributable to the opposing forces of cohort replacement (contributing to more egalitarian beliefs in the population) and intra-cohort change (which contributed to a decreasing acceptance of egalitarian gender beliefs across the 1990s).