Breaking with Traditions? How Parental Separation Affects Adolescents' Gender Ideologies in the UK

Abstract

In the context of increasing deinstitutionalisation of family relationships, this study assesses the
argument that parental union dissolution leads to more egalitarian gender ideologies among children, thereby promoting the gender revolution. Integrating a sociological understanding of gender as social structure with social-cognitive theory of gender development, we investigate whether any effect of parental union dissolution can be explained by parents restructuring work and care responsibilities along more egalitarian lines after separation. Although parental separation is an increasingly common experience, gender socialisation research has focused on biological two-parent families. Evidence on variations in gender ideologies by family structures is scant and based mostly on cross-sectional data from US.
Drawing on longitudinal data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study, this study applied fixed-effects panel models to estimate the effects of parental union dissolution on gender ideologies of 6,577 adolescents between ages 11 and 14. Parental separation is found to result in more egalitarian gender ideologies toward female employment among boys but not among girls. In line with the role restructuring argument, the positive effect of separation on egalitarianism is driven by boys who maintain frequent contact with their nonresident fathers and whose fathers had rarely had full responsibility for childcare before separation.

Keywords: gender ideologies, parental separation, adolescence, maternal employment, fathers