The transformation of US gender role attitudes: cohort replacement, social-structural change, and ideological learning

Growing support for gender equality and a shift toward less restrictive views of gender roles suggest a significant transformation of US public opinion during the second half of the twentieth century. Following the initial discovery of these trends in the 1970s, attitudes toward gender roles received less scholarly attention in the 1980s, due in large part to questions about the relevance of this type of opinion change for understanding patterns of stability and change in behaviors and institutions related to gender. Since the early 1990s, a new generation of research has reported evidence linking changing gender role attitudes to subsequent change in the behavior of individuals and also to the level of gender inequality within specific institutions. While gender role attitudes appear to have significant effects within the context of family institutions, questions about the precise causal origins of these changing attitudes have received insufficient attention in the recent literature. This paper contributes to the sociological reconsideration of this opinion trend by evaluating competing explanations of changing gender role attitudes. We find evidence of substantial cohort replacement effects. Further analyses suggest that processes of ideological learning may mediate a large portion of the cohort replacement effect, also explaining much of the contribution of adult attitude change to opinion trends. We discuss implications of these findings for advancing the literature on gender role attitudes, and also for fruitfully revisiting questions about the role of ideology in US public opinion. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.