Long-Term Effects of Gender Role Attitudes on the Transition to Parenthood: Do Egalitarian Men Catch up?

Eva Bernhardt, Stockholm University
Jani Turunen, Stockholm University

Young men in Sweden with egalitarian attitudes tend to postpone the transition to parenthood, while there is no such effect for egalitarian women. Although slow in the beginning, perhaps they make it up by increasing their likelihood of becoming fathers at more advanced ages. We investigate the long-term effects of gender attitudes on the transition to parenthood in Sweden, with a focus on egalitarian men’s ability to catch up, using attitude data for about 1,500 childless men and women in 1999, and register data on births up to the end of 2012, when the respondents were aged 35-44 years, and run Cox regressions separately for men and women. Preliminary results indicate that much of the positive effect of holding more traditional attitudes on men's transition to parenthood is indeed the result of differences in timing. There is a catching-up effect for men with egalitarian attitudes, but it is only partial.