Is It Better If Women Take Care of the Home and Family?

Looking through 45 years of survey to disentangle gender, religion and partisanship

This post has been unlocked through a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment for the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA). The graphs you see here use data that is publicly available for download and analysis through link(s) provided in the text below.

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I come to the topic for this post through a circuitous route. I was struck by the discourse on social media about a recent announcement in the defense authorization bill. For decades, men between the ages of 18 and 25 are required to sign up for the selective service. It essentially makes it easier for the military to conduct a draft if one becomes necessary because the paperwork is already done.

Well, there’s a proposal to require both men and women to sign up for the selective service. That faced a strong backlash on social media among conservative voices. Denny Burk called the move, “Unconscionable Conscription” in an editorial for WORLD magazine. He writes,

At the end of the day, this issue is irreducibly moral. It goes to the heart of what kind of people we wish to be. Are we really so beholden to the myths of gender theorists that we are willing to send our wives and daughters to be ground up by the rigors of a combat unit? I hope not.

While a lot of political conservatives did comment on this, I was intrigued to see that a majority of those voices came from religious leaders (specifically in evangelical spaces like the Southern Baptist Convention).

I went looking through the ARDA archives for a question about drafting women into military service and came up a bit short. But then I remembered that the General Social Survey has a question that is at least adjacent to the topic of gender roles and gender differences.

The statement is simply: “It is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.” There were four response options ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree. Here’s the best part - it’s been asked pretty consistently since 1977. So we can track how the public has viewed gender roles over the course of four and a half decades.

In 1977, 47% of respondents agreed that things would be better if women took care of the home and family and another 19% strongly agreed with that statement. That means that about two-thirds of the sample had a positive view of traditional gender roles. Those who strongly disagreed with a distinct minority - just 6% of the total sample. That was easily the least popular response when the question was posed in 1977.

Things have obviously shifted in the last 45 years. The share who disagreed with that statement was 28% in 1977. It rose to 44% in the survey fielded in 2022. The strongly disagree option went from 6% to 31%. Now, three quarters of the sample disagree with traditional gender roles. That means only a quarter agree and only 6% strongly agree. It’s nice symmetry that strongly disagree was 6% in 1977 - the same share as strongly agree in 2022.

Let’s take another cut at this data by using political partisanship. This is the share who agreed or strongly agreed with the statement about women taking care of the home and family.

It’s interesting how small the partisan gap was on this issue for a significant period of time. In fact, the differences between the parties didn’t really open up in a statistically significant way until the late 1990s. But the parties have certainly grown apart. In the most recent data, about 30% of Republicans still espouse support for traditional gender roles, compared to about 13% of Democrats.

However, it’s important to note that both parties have moved pretty significantly on this issue. In 1977, two thirds of Republicans and Democrats agreed that women should be homemakers. That share has dropped by more than half in the last 45 years.

Let’s break this down by both gender and political party now.

For male respondents, there was zero partisan gap in responses all the way through the early 1990s. But that’s when Democrat men started separating themselves from Republican men. By 2010, a Republican male was about ten points more likely to support traditional gender roles compared to a Democrat. The gulf only widened from there. In the last survey collected in 2022, 35% of Republican men favored women being in the home. It was just 18% of Democrats.

For women, the partisan divide was evident from nearly the beginning of the time series. By 1995, Republican women were ten points more likely to prefer a women stay in the home compared to female Democrats. It’s notable that Republican support for traditional gender roles actually increased slightly for women between the mid-1990s and the late 2000s. Now, the gap is bigger than ever. About 28% of Republican women believe that women should stay in the home, it’s less than 10% of Democrats.

But, religion has to play a role in this too, right? This data comes from surveys collected in 2021 and 2022.

Evangelicals are easily the most likely to favor traditional gender roles. Thirty-six percent of them agreed that it would be better for everyone if women took care of the home and the family. Black Protestants were in the second position at 30% in favor, followed closely by Catholics at 28%. What really jumps out to me from this graph is that mainline Protestants score the lowest on this question. Just 13% favor traditional gender roles. That’s two points lower than the non-religious in the sample (although the difference is inside the margin of error).

Let’s add gender to this analysis, though. I also added a bracket at the top that represented the gender gap on this question inside each religious tradition. In each case, men were more likely to support traditional gender roles compared to women. Sometimes those differences were relatively small, but other times they were very large.

Clearly the largest gender gap is among Black Protestants. Among men in this tradition, 44% said that they preferred that women take care of the family and the home. That’s the same share as evangelical men. However, Black Protestant women diverge significantly. Only 24% of them favor traditional gender roles compared to 32% of evangelical women. Thus, the gender gap for Black Protestants is twenty percentage points, it’s only 11 points for evangelicals.

The Catholic gap is also large, as well. About a third of male Catholics in the sample believe that women should be homemakers compared to just 21% of women. That gap is right in line with the one from the evangelical sample. The only group listed here without a significant gap were the non-religious - 16% of men were in favor compared to 13% of women. However, note that the lowest percentage of any group were women in the mainline tradition. Just 9% of them favor traditional gender roles. That’s lower than any other Christian group by twelve percentage points.

We have seen how gender, partisanship and religion can all play a role when it comes to support for traditional gender roles, so I thought that I would build a regression model to see which variables still jump out when a lot of factors are thrown into the mix. The interpretation is simple - if the estimate (and the error bars) don’t intersect with zero, that variable is statistically significant. If it’s to the right - that means that it predicts a greater likelihood of supporting traditional gender roles. If it’s to the left, that means less support.

Lots of things jump out here. A number of variables drive down support for traditional gender roles. They are being white, having a higher income, and having a higher level of education. Also, being a mainline Protestant makes one less supportive of women staying in the home instead of the workplace. (For the record, Catholics are the reference category for the faith groups at the bottom. So in this case, you can say that Mainline Protestants are less likely than Catholics to support traditional views of gender roles, all things being held equal).

What drives up support for the view that it’s ideal for women to stay home with the family? Age, being male, aligning with the Republican party, and religious service attendance. Also, being an evangelical makes one more likely to support the view that an ideal household is one where a woman stays home. The one that is easily the most predictive, however, is Republican affiliation. It has a large coefficient than gender, church attendance, and being an evangelical.

I always joke that I don’t want to write my way out of a job, but the data points to a pretty clear conclusion - while religiosity does drive up the likelihood of adopting a traditional view of gender roles, it is not as predictive as political partisanship. Of course, these two things run on similar tracks, so it’s hard to completely pull them apart.

Code for this post can be found here.