Gender ideology: The last barrier to women’s participation in political consumerism?

Abstract

In this article, we analyze how gender affects women’s political participation. More specifically, we test the effect of gender ideology on young women’s participation in political consumerism. The current literature suggests different reasons to explain the gap in political participation between men and women, most importantly focusing on socioeconomic resources, gender roles, and political socialization, whereas little attention has been devoted to the individual interpretation of a woman and man’s own role in society. We test the effects of gender ideology on political consumerism, a form in which women participate more than men. We analyze political consumerism among young urban women, the population most likely to hold an egalitarian gender ideology. Moreover, we compare young women with different job conditions. Although the gender gap is closing or reversing in regard to specific forms of participation, such as consumerism, some inequalities remain, and our study contributes to understanding differences in participation among women themselves.

Keywords

Consumerism employment gender beliefs gender ideology political participation youth

Introduction

Who participates in politics and what drives this participation are two central questions for democracy. They help us understand inequalities that constrain equal political participation by all citizens – that is, an equal chance of having one’s voices heard and of shaping political decisions. Inequalities that hinder political participation take multiple forms: they can be related to educational attainments, to job conditions, to income, or to socio-demographic characteristics such as age, ethnic background, or gender (Jacobs and Skocpol, 2005; Schlozman et al., 2005; Soss and Jacobs, 2009). In this article, we are interested in the unequal participation of young women in political consumerism.

Research on women’s political participation has long tried to explain the gender gap, which refers to women’s lower rate of participation in voting and in other political actions. However, the most recent research in this field shows that the gender gap is closing (Burns et al., 2001; Coffé and Bolzendahl, 2010; Conway, 2000; Inglehart and Norris, 2003; Paxton et al., 2007) or even reversing for some specific forms of participation, such as political consumerism (Stolle and Micheletti, 2005). The closing and the reversing of the gender gap opens avenues for new research focusing on differences in the political participation of women depending on their political resources, beliefs and attitudes. Following Nancy Burns (2005), we contend that

[w]e have to theorize and model the ways gender works homogeneously and heterogeneously, not because heterogeneity is a goal in itself, but rather because we will get the story wrong if we focus solely on the things that all women or all men share. (p. 140, authors’ emphasis)

Thus, focusing on political consumerism – a frequent mode of political participation among women, and one in which more than only the most educated and resourceful women participate (Stolle and Hooghe, 2011) – can help us unravel the reasons behind female participation or the lack thereof.

This topic is a timely one, as espoused by Elizabeth Gidengil (2007) in her presidential address to the Canadian Political Science Association, because we know little about what drives differences in political participation – not only between men and women but also among women of different social classes, with different educational attainments, and with different political resources. Gender inequalities interact with other divisions in society that affect the likelihood of participating in politics – for instance, class and age inequalities. Because ‘the gender gaps in political participation have narrowed, disappeared or even reversed, what we really need to understand is why there are such differences among different groups of women’ (Gidengil, 2007: 826–827).

In this article, we are interested in the main reason(s) for heterogeneous political participation among young women. Thus, we consider, in particular, a post-materialistic argument related to gender ideology. We argue that the ways in which young women conceive of gender roles – what we term gender ideology – contribute to their political participation. The reason to address the issue from the gender ideology perspective relates to the lack of a robust explanation regarding the diversity in terms of political participation found among women. ‘Controlling for a variety of relevant demographic characteristics and political attitudes did not impact gender gaps as much as might be expected based on theories of differential resources or gender role socialization’ (Coffé and Bolzendahl, 2010: 331). Indeed, Diekman and Schneider (2010) stress the importance of considering potential variation in how the individuals understand their gender roles. Furthermore, we test potential variations of this effect across employment statuses.

We find that gender ideology, which can be thought of as a continuum from more egalitarian to more traditional beliefs about women’s roles in both paid and care work, affects women’s political participation. Women who hold a more egalitarian gender ideology are more likely to participate, whereas more traditionally oriented women are less likely to do so. However, congruency between one’s employment status and one’s beliefs about women’s roles in society is required for gender ideology to foster political consumerism. Our study contributes to the understanding of differences in the political participation of young women by adding one possible mechanism through which gender may affect political participation – namely, through beliefs about women’s and men’s roles in the family and in the labor market.

In the remainder of the article, we first introduce the main concepts and review the literature on the gender gap, on women’s political participation, and more specifically, on political consumerism. We then turn to the existing explanations of women’s political participation. Next, we discuss the concept of gender ideology, how it is shaped by lived experiences and how it contributes to the development of the hypotheses we propose to test. Then, we move to the empirical part of our research and present the interview data we use as well as the methods. Finally, we discuss the results of our analyses and the main findings of our research.

Setting the framework

In this section, we briefly introduce the key concepts of our article and the key issue that we later develop in the literature review. The three main pieces composing our puzzle are the employment situation of the women under scrutiny and their gender ideology, along with the specific political mode of participation we are studying: consumerism.

Research on women’s political participation shows that employment situation (Iversen and Rosenbluth, 2006; Schlozman et al., 1999), family situation (Burns et al., 2001; Voorpostel and Coffé, 2010), and political socialization (Gidengil et al., 2010; Hooghe and Stolle, 2004a; Sapiro and Conover, 2001) all contribute to differences found between women’s and men’s political participation. Fewer studies address the effects of these elements on differences in political participation among women. Societal transformations resulted in increased participation of women in the labor force, women’s access to higher education, and female professional careers. Women’s participation in paid employment, in turn, transformed the political socialization of children (Sapiro, 2004). However, women are confronted with more or less opportunities of achieving high income and professional success depending on their sector of activity. In other words, women do not form a homogeneous social group, and therefore, it is relevant to explain variations in the political participation of women in relation to their professional status. Here, we propose to test whether gender ideology contributes to explaining differences among women’s participation in political consumerism depending on their employment situation.

Gender ideology refers to beliefs about the division of paid and care work based on a gendered division of work between men (working outside the home to provide a living, the breadwinner) and women (working within the home to provide care and nurture the family) within heterosexual couples. Following Davis and Greenstein (2009), gender ideology can be defined as ‘an individual’s level of support for a division of paid work and family responsibilities that is based on the notion of separate spheres’ (p. 89). Gender ideology is found to influence educational, professional, marital, and maternal choices (see Davis and Greenstein, 2009: for a review of the effects of gender ideology). Thus, it may also influence choices related to political participation. Indeed, politics, similar to full-time employment during most of the 20th century, is viewed as a man’s world and participation in it is shaped by gendered conceptions of women’s and men’s roles in society (see Lovenduski and Norris, 1993; Norris and Lovenduski, 1995: for a discussion of gender effects on party candidates for elections). Gender ideology shapes not only women’s employment but also their participation in politics. However, individuals can modify or contribute to shaping the adopted gender roles within and outside of the family (Diekman and Schneider, 2010). Moreover, professional and personal situations contribute to defining gender ideology throughout one’s life (Bolzendahl and Myers, 2004). Thus, employment and gender ideology influence each other.

Egalitarian gender ideology may also be framed as a post-materialistic value (Inglehart, 1997; Inglehart and Norris, 2003) also for this reason it will favor women engagement in unconventional political actions. Among different possible behaviors of this kind, we focus on one form of political participation – political consumerism, which is understood as the choice to buy or avoid consuming certain goods and services for political reasons. Political consumerism can be defined even more precisely as the ‘consumer choice of producers and products with the goal of changing objectionable institutional or market practices’ (Micheletti et al., 2004: xiv). We choose to focus on political consumerism based on previous findings showing that in this form of participation, women are even more active than men (Stolle and Micheletti, 2005). This means that, in this form of participation, we have a greater chance of finding women with different profiles participating – in other words, not only the most educated and resourceful women engage in political consumerism. Thus, we test the effect of gender ideology in the form of political participation where we expect it to play a more determinant role given the presence of a wider set of women. Hence, we provide a reliable test of our hypothesis because the barrier for participating in this form is lower.

The main argument of the article is that young women who hold a gender ideology favoring equal involvement of women and men in paid employment and care work are more active in political consumerism than women holding more traditional views about gender roles. This is because women’s conception of equality between men and women also supports engagement in other domains of public life that are traditionally dominated by men. However, because gender ideology is shaped by lived experiences, we expect to find differences depending on the women’s employment status. In other words, we expect that employment status moderates the effects of gender ideology on political participation. Thus, we posit that gender ideology varies across employment statuses and contributes differently to the political participation of employed, precariously employed, and unemployed young women.

We test this argument empirically with data on young women living in four European cities. The focus on urban youth provides us with more variety in terms of attitude towards gender, as the more progressive forces tend to live in urban contexts and gender ideologies favoring equality are also more widespread among younger women (Brooks and Bolzendahl, 2004; Davis and Greenstein, 2009). Moreover, the data offer a unique sample of unemployed, employed, and precariously employed young women to control for a differential effect of gender ideology depending on labor market status. Thus, these data allow us to test the effects of gender ideology on the political consumerism of young women who are involved in the labor market differently, thereby allowing us to consider the specific way in which gender develops and operates (Burns, 2005).

Transformations in women’s political participation

As mentioned in the introduction, most of the literature on women’s political participation is interested in comparing women’s and men’s political participation and assessing differences in how much they participate, what is often referred to as the gender gap. Although we focus on a comparison of women only, we begin with a review of the existing findings on the gender gap in the Western world and its evolution.

Recent research shows that differences in political participation between women and men vary across modes of participation (Coffé and Bolzendahl, 2010) and suggests that the gender gap is diminishing or even disappearing in certain modes. At the turn of the 21st century, the gender gap in the most common form of participation – namely, voting – is shrinking or even disappearing when compared to the 1960s or 1970s (Burns et al., 2001; Coffé and Bolzendahl, 2010; Inglehart and Norris, 2003; Paxton et al., 2007). Similarly, Schussman and Soule’s (2005) work on protest activities in the United States found that women in the 1990s were no longer less likely to engage in protest activities when considering a broad range of social movements. This is consistent with the findings of other research in the United States (Burns et al., 2001) and in Europe (Van Aelst and Walgrave, 2001). However, with regard to other institutional political activities, particularly those associated with political parties, women remain less engaged than men (Inglehart and Norris, 2003; Paxton et al., 2007). Generally, women are found to be less active in institutionalized modes of political participation and more active in non-institutionalized modes (Coffé and Bolzendahl, 2010; Marien et al., 2010); this is particularly true for younger women. It may be because they have a negative conception of institutional politics and tend to engage more in civic life (Taft, 2006, 2014).

Interestingly, research also highlights one form of participation in which women are more active than men. In political consumerism, researchers find that the gender gap is now reversed, favoring women (Stolle and Micheletti, 2005, 2013). Political consumerism refers to political actions taken through the consumption or avoidance of goods and services for political reasons. At the collective level, political consumerism mostly takes the form of boycott campaigns; at the individual level, citizens engage in it by buying or boycotting certain products for political reasons (Dubuisson-Quellier, 2013; Hawkins, 2010; Neilson, 2010). There are also other consumerist phenomena, such as the refusal to consume or the free exchange of goods and services outside market structures. However, these are less common forms of consumerism and are far less studied (see, for instance, Albinsson and Yasanthi Perera, 2012; Conill et al., 2012). To explain this reversed gender gap, the authors propose a number of explanations. The first relates to women’s higher involvement in shopping for the family. Although this might explain historical boycott campaigns that were often initiated and led by women, it does not account for the higher political consumerism found among female students in Belgium, Canada, and Sweden in the 2000s (Stolle and Micheletti, 2005). These authors instead contend that it is related to post-materialistic values and to other-regarding preferences (caring for others’ well-being) that are both more common among women (Stolle and Micheletti, 2005). Furthermore, political consumerism is a form of everyday political participation that is non-institutionalized and requires limited resources (Stolle and Micheletti, 2005): it is non-institutionalized because it does not work along the rationale of the representative democracy, it requires little effort because it is imbued in the everyday life and implies a limited amount of time, energy, and money. Reflecting on the democratic aspect of ‘creative’ forms of political participation, such as political consumerism, among others, Van Deth (2012) argues that it is neither the form nor the domain of action that contributes to its definition as a political act, but rather the motives. For our concerns here, political consumerism can be considered as an act through which individuals pursue political goals (Micheletti, 2003). Indeed, the questions used to capture political consumerism clearly state that we are interested in practices of buying or refusing to buy products for political reasons. Thus, the individuals who answered positively give a political meaning to this action.

Explaining women’s political participation

In the literature on women’s political participation, two major explanations are used to account for the gender gap: (1) differences in terms of available resources and (2) differences in terms of political attitudes (for a discussion see Coffé and Bolzendahl, 2011; Engeli et al., 2006). The former considers explanations related to women’s participation in paid work in the labor market and unpaid care work within the family. It is related to the socioeconomic status (SES) model and assesses the acquisition of resources that foster political participation. The main argument is that paid work sustains participation in politics through the acquisition of resources that foster political participation, whereas care work hinders political participation by limiting access to these resources – namely, time, money, civic skills, and access to networks (Schlozman et al., 1994, 1995, 1999; Verba et al., 1997).

Schlozman et al. (1999) analyzed the determinants of women’s employment – the self-selection of women into the labor market at different professional levels – and its effects on political participation (as measured through an index). They show that, although the effects of single predictors of labor market participation and job levels contribute slightly to political participation, together they account for a significant share of the gender gap. Iversen and Rosenbluth (2006) show that participation in paid employment contributes to political participation not only by increasing resources (money) and inclusion in networks that support political participation, but also through its effects on how women and men share domestic work within the household. Moreover, Burns et al. (2001) found that the gendered division of domestic work does not hinder women’s political participation through its impact on resources. However, it affects women’s political participation through normative beliefs about gender equality, thus pointing to the importance of including gender ideology in explanations of women’s political participation. Finally, researchers working on biographical availability – that is, analyzing specific moments in life, such as entering the labor market, getting married or having children, that impact the availability of time for engagement in political activities (Beyerlein and Hipp, 2006) – highlight contradictory effects of marital status on women’s political participation. More specifically, they show that depending on the form of political participation, civil status either fosters or hinders participation: divorce or separation reduces voting behavior (Voorpostel and Coffé, 2010) and fosters protest activities (Corrigall-Brown, 2012).

There is also a competing explanation related to political attitudes. This latter explanation highlights differences in terms of attitudes towards politics and the role of political socialization, which results in women’s lower interest in and motivation to engage in politics (for a review see Sapiro, 2004). In this second strand of literature, research on political socialization discusses the role of political attitudes in explaining women’s political participation. A number of studies show that children’s and teenagers’ political socialization is not gender neutral (see Fridkin and Kenney, 2007: for a literature review). Differences appear in the acquisition of political views and their relationship to the political sphere between girls and boys (Andersen and Cook, 1985; Jennings, 1983; Paulsen, 1991). Working with teenagers, Hooghe and Stolle (2004b) demonstrate that 14-year-old girls take political activism into consideration as much as, or more than, boys of the same age when offered a wide variety of political activities. Girls favor those activities related to volunteering, whereas boys favor those related to party politics. This already reveals a gender gap in girls’ and boys’ anticipated modes of political participation. Fridkin and Kenney (2007) confirm that the political socialization of women during their childhoods is less supportive of their political engagement. Thus, young women perceive politics as a man’s world. Gidengil et al. (2010) find that women who report that their mothers were politically active are also more likely to engage in political activities and to score higher on political interest and efficacy. Furthermore, they establish that the effect of mothers as role models is stronger than that of subsequent socializing experiences, such as education or employment. Other studies support this argument by showing the importance of socialization in transmitting political attitudes, such as political interest and political efficacy (Gidengil and Stolle, 2012; Mayer and Schmidt, 2004; Verba et al., 1997).

When included in the same analysis, SES and political attitudes reveal different effects on different forms of participation. Coffé and Bolzendahl (2010) find that, when controlling for political interest and political efficacy, women are significantly more likely to vote than men and that women are more active in consumer activities when including socioeconomic and political attitude predictors. Overall, it appears that SES and biographical availability are more important in explaining institutional participation than in explaining political consumerism, whereas political attitudes contribute equally in predicting institutional and new forms of participation. However, the two strands are not competing hypotheses but complementary determinants of political behaviors, which vary in strength according to specific targets, countries and behavior under scrutiny. For this reason, we propose to include in our model the two sets of predictors highlighted here – on the one hand, SES and biographical availability and, on the other, political attitudes – as control variables when testing the effects of gender ideology.

Adding gender ideology to explain women’s political consumerism

Gender ideology is a set of beliefs about women’s involvement in different sex roles or life spheres, such as the professional and the familial (see Davis and Greenstein, 2009: for a literature review). One’s gender ideology can be more egalitarian or more traditional depending on one’s views about female involvement in different life spheres that are deemed more or less ‘masculine’ domains. We consider that an egalitarian gender ideology entails support for similar involvement of both women and men in any sphere of life, be it public or private, whereas persons holding a more traditional gender ideology would expect different commitments of women and men in the family and in paid work, for instance.

Gender ideology is widely studied to explain how various choices in women’s lives are affected by beliefs about gender (see Davis and Greenstein, 2009: for a literature review). Studies show that gender ideology contributes to choices in terms of education (Davis and Pearce, 2007) and employment (Corrigall and Konrad, 2007) as well as marriage (Vespa, 2009) or maternity and housework (Carlson and Lynch, 2013; Greenstein, 1996). Because gender ideology shapes both professional and personal choices, we expect that it also contributes to political choices and to participation in political consumerism. In fact, gender ideology is found to have effects on politics as well. Paxton and Kunovich (2003) show that gender ideology affects the probability of electing a female. Traditional ideology affects both the electoral choice (citizens not voting for women) and the selection of candidates (women not running for election). However, to the best of our knowledge, no study has addressed the effects of gender ideology on other forms of political participation.

Furthermore, research has considered the determinants of gender ideology to understand what leads women and men to be more or less egalitarian (Bolzendahl and Myers, 2004; Corrigall and Konrad, 2007; Kroska and Elman, 2009). The most important explanations of gender ideology are interest-based and exposure-based (Bolzendahl and Myers, 2004). First, the interest-based explanation is related to the idea that people have different interests and that these interests, in turn, explain differences in support for gender equality. Mostly, this serves to explain women’s higher commitment to gender equality because they are the main beneficiaries of changes in society favoring a more equal division of work, status, and rights between men and women. Second, the exposure-based explanation explains how education, socialization, and personal experiences all contribute to the construction of specific beliefs about gender roles. The general idea is that when exposed to a situation implying more equality, people become more egalitarian. For instance, in the labor market, women are in contact with other working women. This enhances their support for women’s employment and for an equal division of work between men and women. Gender ideology is constructed through a dynamic process and may change over time. Indeed, the idea of exposure is that the specific situation one experiences in shapes her views about gender roles. This would also imply reverse causation in which women select to be exposed to those inputs reinforcing their own beliefs. Thus, the exposure argument predicts that the more a woman is involved in paid work, the more she will support an equal division of work. On the contrary, the more she is involved in family and care work, the more she will support a traditional division of work. Interestingly, Davis (2007) shows that lived experiences are more important than social background in explaining young adults’ gender ideology. The construction and re-construction of one’s beliefs about women’s and men’s role in the public and the private spheres over time is related to one’s personal experience in terms of employment, marriage, and children.

We are especially interested in variations in terms of gender ideology that are related to one’s current employment situation: being long-term unemployed, precariously employed, or regularly employed at the time of the interview. The expectations that can be derived from interest- and exposure-based explanations in relation to employment partly overlap. It is difficult to untangle whether employment fosters egalitarian views because of interest, defending one’s position in the labor market, or due to exposure to feminist or anti-discrimination views and conciliation practices (Bolzendahl and Myers, 2004: 763). Nevertheless, specific events in the life course shape gender beliefs. For instance, Corrigall and Konrad (2007) find that women who have had their first child reduce their support for gender egalitarianism. More interesting for us here, Kroska and Elman (2009) show that women who start to work or increase their paid work become more supportive of mothers’ involvement in the labor market. They refer to this mechanism as the control hypothesis, stating that individuals will adapt their views about gender equality to their current situation to reduce inconsistencies between attitudes and behaviors (Kroska and Elman, 2009).

This is also in line with research discussing women’s engagement in the private sphere in domestic and care work as an alternative to unemployment, particularly during long-lasting periods of joblessness. Studies highlight that, for women, the boundaries between inactivity and unemployment are fuzzy (Maruani, 2004); female unemployment tends to be underestimated (Davies and Esseveld, 1982; Maruani, 2002), and these studies show that women’s unemployment is less recognized due to the idea that women can invest their time and energy in the private sphere when they do not have a paid job (Bachmann et al., 2003; Maruani, 2001). Hence, the assignment of women to the private sphere blurs the boundaries of unemployment. Does it also offer alternative (valued) identities to unemployed women? Davies and Esseveld (1982) explain that investment in domestic and care work does not replace paid employment and commitment to it. However, it may moderate the negative consequences of unemployment by offering alternative activities and a valued identity. Following this line of thought, unemployed women may reduce their support for female involvement in paid work and also decrease their support for women who work when they have young children in an attempt to increase the consistency between their current employment status and their beliefs about gender roles.

Based on the gender ideology theory, we expect that young women who hold more feminist and egalitarian views will be more likely to participate in political consumerism because, in their conception of gender roles, political participation is equally a man’s and a woman’s business (hypothesis 1). This is also in line with post-modernization theory (Inglehart, 1997) suggesting people with post-materialistic stance are more prone to unconventional political behavior as compared to more traditionalist people. We expect that this effect will be robust and hold when controlling for the main predictors of political participation stemming from the literature on the gender gap, such as SES (Verba et al., 1995), political attitudes (Inglehart and Norris, 2003; Verba et al., 1995), and biographical availability (Corrigall-Brown, 2012). It is important to note here that some of these controls are also predictors of gender ideology, in particular those related to SES and biographical availability (education, employment, family situation), and they may wash out the effects of gender ideology.

Furthermore, we propose to investigate differences across employment statuses. Following the SES model, we expect long-term unemployed women to have a lower rate of participation than regular workers. As for precarious youth, Bassoli and Monticelli (2011) suggest that their participation vary according to the type of political action. While in conventional political behaviors precarious are more active, in unconventional ones they are as active as regular workers. Hence, the precarious women’s rate of participation should be analogous to regular workers in political consumerism. However rather than focusing on job condition only, we are interested in the interaction with gender ideology. More specifically, we anticipate that long-term unemployed women will hold less egalitarian gender beliefs to reduce discrepancies with their personal situations of joblessness. Both the exposure-based explanation and the control hypothesis point to the importance of the current employment situation for gender ideology.¹ Due to their less egalitarian gender beliefs and their labor condition, we expect that the long-term unemployed young women participate less in political consumerism (hypothesis 2a). The theories used to define our hypotheses do not allow us to predict what will happen to those women who have incongruent gender beliefs and employment status. Thus, we do not formulate a hypothesis on the effect of an increase in egalitarian beliefs for young unemployed women. Finally, precarious workers move in and out of the labor market. Thus, we expect to observe a similar effect of gender ideology for the regularly and the precariously employed young women (hypothesis 2b).

Data and methods

We use a unique dataset collected within the framework of a European research project on Youth, Unemployment, and Exclusion (YOUNEX). This dataset allows us to study urban young women and to compare the effects of gender ideology across employment statuses. In fact, the respondents are all living in a city and are 18–34 years old. The four cities, Geneva (Switzerland), Turin (Italy), Cologne (Germany), and Lyon (France), represent different welfare regimes. Selecting urban young women allows us to work with young women who are exposed to egalitarian gender models.

The data is derived from computer-assisted telephone interviews conducted in four European cities on representative samples of long-term unemployed youth (301 in Geneva, 480 in Turin, 329 in Cologne, and 406 in Lyon), precariously employed youth (250, 480, 411, and 410, respectively), and a control group of regularly employed youth (317, 484, 407, and 395). Long-term unemployment is defined as having been without a job for at least one year, whereas regularly employed youth are defined as having had an open-ended contract for at least one year, and precariously employed youth are those who have had multiple fixed-end contracts and move in and out of the labor market. The fieldwork was conducted between 2009 and 2010. The project website provides both the full questionnaire (YOUNEX, 2009) and any other information about national survey (YOUNEX, 2012).

The dependent variable is political consumerism, which includes boycotting or buying products for political reasons. Using these two measures of political consumerism is a standard practice in the study of political consumerism, as few additional items measuring it are available (Stolle and Micheletti, 2013). We constructed a dichotomous variable coded as one when the respondent took part in either one of the activities, or in both activities, during the last 12 months and zero otherwise. Descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) of political consumerism are presented in Appendix 1 by employment status, along with all independent variables.

The first model assesses the impact of gender ideology on political consumerism. We use one independent variable that measure gender ideology. We construct an index with two continuous variables measuring views about women’s and men’s roles in the labor market and in the household. Two questions were asked to measure agreement with the situation of, respectively women and men working full-time while having children under three years old,² this corresponds to common measures of gender ideology (see Davis and Greenstein, 2009: for a discussion of these measures). The first question measures agreement with statements considering women’s relationship to children while working. It assesses more egalitarian/traditional stances toward women’s role in the private and public spheres. Although gender equality currently finds more support, female participation in the workforce while having children remains a central component of gender ideology and egalitarian beliefs. Thus, the first question measuring ‘support for female full-time employment while having young children’ already captures a more egalitarian gender ideology because respondents who agree with it conceive that women can work full-time if they want to, even when they have young children. In addition the second question measures agreement with more traditional conceptions of the main breadwinner in the family. Men’s full-time employment while having children is questioned less often and remains the most common division of work among heterosexual families. Our second question, ‘support for male full-time employment while having young children’, measures agreement with a full-time working father. It is a measure of agreement with the traditional breadwinner model and captures a more traditional gender ideology translated into support for the traditional division of paid and care work between women and men. Yet, in isolation none of these two measures can capture one’s gender ideology in relation to the conciliation of employment and care. In order to do so, we need to compare support for female and for male full-time work while having young children. Hence, we construct an index of gender ideology by subtracting support for female breadwinner to support for male breadwinner.³ In so doing, we measure egalitarian gender ideology in the form of support for an equal dual-earner model when the same score is attributed to both women and men as breadwinners (zero on our index). But also deviation from it in the form of a) support for male breadwinner model in the reversed situation, that is when the respondents supports men working full-time while having young children but less so women (positive scores) or b) support for female breadwinner model when the respondent supports women working full-time while having young children, but does not equally support men working full-time in the same situation (negative scores). This last option was not anticipated in our theoretical part, it reflects a more radical⁴ position defending women empowerment through support for a greater involvement of women – than men – in paid employment thanks to men’s greater engagement in care work. As can be expected, we find few respondents who are supportive of the female breadwinner model – thus we recode the lower end of our scale to avoid empty cells in our models. We recode all score ranging from −10 to −5 as −5, thus our index runs from −5 to +10.⁵

In the following models, we insert other predictors which correspond to the two sets of variables used to account for women’s political participation and are used as control variables.

In the second model, we introduce socio-demographic and socioeconomic controls (SES model). More specifically, we include age and nationality as socio-demographic controls and use education, employment status, and financial difficulties as predictors of SES. Age is a continuous variable ranging from 18 to 34 years old, and nationality is a dichotomous variable coded as one when the respondent holds citizenship of the country where she lives and zero otherwise. Education is a three-state categorical variable. It includes below secondary education (used as the reference category), secondary education, and tertiary education. Regarding the definition of precarious workers, most scholars (Armano and Murgia, 2013; De Witte and Näswall, 2003) interpret precariousness as a subjectively perceived condition. Yet it is very hard to find a subjectively driven operationalization in the literature, so we assume temporary contracts as a proxy for job precariousness as most authors do (Bassoli and Monticelli, 2011; Marx and Picot, 2013), although we are well aware this may be an oversimplification. Thus employment status includes long-term unemployed (used as the reference category) those women actively looking for job in the past twelve months, regularly employed – including workers with open-ended contracts who have been working in the same workplace in the 12 months preceding the interview and precariously employed holding temporary, seasonal or project-based contracts. Finally, financial difficulties are measured with a dichotomous variable based on a question asking how difficult it is to cope with one’s current income. Financial difficulty is coded as one when the respondent finds it difficult to cope with current income and zero otherwise.

In the third model, we add measures of political resources (Verba et al., 1995), including political attitudes (Inglehart and Norris, 2003) and social capital (Engeli et al., 2006). We control for political interest, external political efficacy, and internal political efficacy, which are all dichotomous variables. Political interest is based on a subjective measure and is coded as one when the respondent says she is interested in politics and zero otherwise. External political efficacy is based on a question asking whether individuals like the respondent have an influence on politics and is coded as one when the respondent thinks so, zero otherwise. Internal political efficacy is measured through a subjective question asking how difficult the respondent considers politics to be (Niemi et al., 1991). Moreover, we control for left-right self-placement using a self-anchoring 10-point scale recoded into a categorical variable. We consider three states in this categorical variable, comparing those who place themselves on the left or on the right to those who did not place themselves on either side (no response and center self-placement). Finally, as a measure of social capital, we control for associational membership, coded as one when the respondent was a member of one or more civil society organizations and zero otherwise.

In model four, we include two measures of biographical availability, types of relationship and living with children (Corrigall-Brown, 2012). The type of relationship is a categorical variable with four states: married (reference category), living in a partnership, in a relationship, and single. The measure for children is also a dichotomous variable coded as one when the respondent lives with children and zero otherwise.

We run logistic regressions to predict women’s engagement in political consumerism. We use a stepwise approach to test our three hypotheses. The stepwise approach allows us to successively introduce the different sets of predictors of women’s political participation. First, we include only gender ideology and the city dummies to account for contextual fixed effects. Then, we introduce our control variables to account for the strength of gender ideology in predicting political consumerism when controlling for the main explanations of women’s participation. Finally, we introduce the interaction term between our measure of gender ideology and employment status to test our second hypothesis. The use of the interaction terms is of utmost importance to disentangle the relationship between employment status and gender ideology, above all to control for the effect of consistency between the two (egalitarian ideology while employed and support for male breadwinner while unemployed).

We present average marginal effects (AME) and predictive margins at representative values to facilitate the understanding of our results. Moreover, this allows us to show the substantial effect of gender ideology in predicting political consumerism. AME calculates the effect of a move from the lowest to the highest category in specific independent variables while holding all other variables at their observed values. Here, we calculate the effects of moving from the lowest to the highest scores on both measures of gender ideology to show the importance of gender ideology in predicting political consumerism. Furthermore, to compare the AME of gender ideology with those of other predictors, we also calculate AME for education (as a component of SES) and political resources. In the second step, we plot the effects of support for female, male, or dual-breadwinner on political consumerism for the three employment statuses using predictive margins.

Results

Turning to the results of our analysis, we first present descriptive statistics on gender ideology among young urban women. Then, we discuss the substantial effects of gender ideology in the different steps of our logistic regressions and in comparison to other important predictors of political participation. Finally, we turn to the different effects of gender ideology depending on the employment status of young women.

Figure 1 plots gender ideology by employment status. We first see that the gender ideology of most young urban women reflects support for an equal dual-breadwinner model, indeed almost half of all respondents are situated on the zero of our index. Interestingly, the percentage of young long-term unemployed supporting the equal dual-breadwinner (42.5%) is smaller than that of precariously and regularly employed young women (48.6 and 49.8, respectively). This difference is statistically significant as assessed with adjusted residuals (−2.78 for this cell).⁶ As we move towards support for a male breadwinner model (+10 on our scale), we see that young unemployed women are under-represented on score one, quite on the contrary they represent higher shares among women found on scores 2, 3, and 10. At the more extreme end of our scale, scoring 10 in support for the male breadwinner model, are only few young urban women. Nonetheless, this points at a stronger approval of the male breadwinner model among the young unemployed women. In addition, the precariously employed women tend to be less in favor of this model and slightly more in favor of the female breadwinner (only on the minus one score). Since it is difficult to account for differences across groups in this figure, we also use a t-test to compare the means across the three groups.⁷ We find that the mean score for unemployed women is significantly higher than that of regularly or precariously employed women, thus confirming more support for the male breadwinner model among unemployed women. On the contrary, the average score of the precariously employed young women is the lowest, falling closer to the dual-earner model. This suggests that unemployed women hold a less egalitarian gender ideology. This finding is important, as it goes in the direction postulated in the second hypothesis (2a). Additionally, the precarious youth hold similar views as the regularly employed young women, only slightly more egalitarian, also going in the expected direction – that is, fewer differences between regularly and precariously employed youth (hypothesis 2b).

Figure 1.

Gender ideology by employment status.

Moving to the impact of gender ideology on political behaviors, we look at the first part of Table 1 (models 1–4), which presents the effects of our measure of gender ideology on political consumerism when controlling for the different sets of identified predictors. Since our measure of gender ideology is an index centered on the egalitarian support for a dual-earner model, we calculate two types of AMEs. The first captures the change when moving from this egalitarian position to support for the traditional male breadwinner model. The second captures a more particular spectrum of gender ideologies running from male breadwinner to female breadwinner. Thus, at both extremes stands support for a division of roles related to sex with support for only either female or male full-time employment while having young children, at one extreme the traditional male breadwinner model and at the other the more unexpected female breadwinner model.

Table 1.

Effects of gender ideology in predicting political consumerism.

	(1)	(2)	(3)	(4)	(5) AME (0/10)	(5) AME (−5/10)
Main effect of Gender ideology
From egalitarian to male breadwinner	.140^*** [.07,.21]	.109^*** [.04,.17]	.088^** [.03,.15]	.086^** [.02,.15]
From male breadwinner to female breadwinner	.266^*** [.14,.40]	.210^** [.08,.34]	.170^** [.05,.29]	.166^** [.04,.29]
Conditional by employment status
Unemployed women					.007 [−.10,.09]	.014 [−.21,.18]
Precariously employed women					.174^** [.06, 29]	.349^** [.12, .57]
Regularly employed women					.102⁺ [−.01, .21]	.204⁺ [−.01,.42,]
N	2019	2019	2019	2019	2019	2019
Pseudo R²	.095	.153	.205	.207	.210	.210

Source: Appendix 2, model 1–5.

We present Average Marginal Effects (AME) calculated when moving from minimum to maximum on our measure of gender ideology. In order to facilitate the interpretability of the results, we reversed the scale and we propose two min-max variations, from 0 to 10 captures changes from support for male breadwinner to support for egalitarianism, but also from −5 to 10 which captures changes from support for male breadwinner to support for female breadwinner. We present also 95 percent confidence intervals in brackets.

Model 1 – Controls included: cities.

Model 2 – Controls included: cities; socio-demographic and socioeconomic variables.

Model 3 – Controls included: cities; socio-demographic and socioeconomic variables; political resources.

Model 4 – Controls included: cities; socio-demographic and socioeconomic variables; political resources; biographical availability.

Model 5 – Controls included: cities; socio-demographic and socioeconomic variables; political resources; biographical availability; interaction term between employment status and gender ideology, the change from 0 to 1.

Model 6 – Controls included: cities; socio-demographic and socioeconomic variables; political resources; biographical availability; interaction term between employment status and gender ideology, the change from 0 to 1.

p < 0.10, ^*p < 0.05, ^**p < 0.01, ^***p < 0.00.

Starting with the effects of egalitarian dual-earner gender ideology, we see that it increases participation in political consumerism. However, the effect is strongest when no controls are included in the model except for the city dummies; in this case, the increase reaches 14.0 percent. When adding the SES variables as controls, we see that support for female as breadwinner still increases the probability of engaging in political consumerism by 10.9 percent. However, when we add the next set of controls, that is, political resources, support for a dual-earner model contributes to the probability of participating by only 8.8 percent. Finally, in model 4, measures of biographical availability slightly contribute to the model; there is almost no change in the effect of egalitarian gender beliefs. Thus, controlling for the most important predictors of women’s political participation, we find that holding a more egalitarian gender ideology measured by support for female conciliation contributes to political consumerism, as stated in our first hypothesis.

Moving to the second set of AME that we calculated for the less common range of gender ideology running from support for a male breadwinner model to support for a female breadwinner model, in the lower part of Table 2, we see that having this strong stance on women participation in the labor market at the expense of men’s involvement in it (female breadwinner model) boosts the probability of participating in political consumerism by 26.6 percent when controlling only for cities. Again, increases in the probability to do political consumerism for women who hold these empowering gender ideology is not as strong when we further include controls in our model, but remains at 16.6 percent with all controls included.

Let us now turn to our second and third hypotheses to determine whether we find different effects across employment statuses. To do so, we also present the effects of our measure of gender ideology when we include an interaction between gender ideology and employment status (model 5).

Considering our model 5, in Figure 2, we plotted the predicted probabilities of participating in political consumerism at the various levels of gender ideology by employment status. This allowed us to see the differential effects of gender ideology on the probability of participation for each employment status. Figure 2 illustrates the positive effects of supporting a female breadwinner model on the probability of participating in political consumerism for regularly and precariously employed young women (the two ascending lines with diamonds and triangles that go from the zero reference line to the left-hand side of the figure). But we also see, on the right of the reference line, that as regularly and precariously employed women are more supportive of a male breadwinner model, their probability to engage in political consumerism diminishes. In addition, the plot shows the absence of effect of gender ideology for the long-term unemployed, as illustrated by the quasi-flat line with dots throughout the figure. Returning to Table 1, we see that our first hypothesis holds for regularly employed young women. In fact, for regularly employed women, support for egalitarian dual-earner model increases the probability of participating in political consumerism by 10.2 percent when all the other controls are included in the model, although the result is only significant at a 10 percent threshold we see that the confidence intervals only cut marginally the zero line pointing at uncertainty of the estimate (it runs from −0.01 to .21/42). Furthermore, for those who support the female breadwinner model it increases by up to 20 percent. For the precariously employed women, the picture is similar to that of regularly employed women, as stated in hypothesis 2b; however, the effect is stronger (17.4% and 34.9% increase respectively), and there is now more confidence around the statistical estimate. Finally, for unemployed women, holding a more egalitarian gender ideology or even favoring a female breadwinner model does not have any effect on political consumerism.

Figure 2.

Predicted probabilities of political consumerism.

Finally, in Figure 3, we assess the importance of gender ideology in predicting political consumerism. More specifically, we compare the AME of our measure of gender ideology to some of the most important predictors of political participation. Because we find that the effects of gender ideology differ across employment statuses, we present the marginal effect separately for each group. The figure is based on our full models, which includes all the controls identified in the literature on women’s political participation. Figure 3 nicely shows the variations across groups and, more importantly, the predictive power of gender ideology. Gender ideology is among the strongest predictors of participation in political consumerism for both precariously and regularly employed women. The magnitude of gender ideology is similar to, or even bigger than, that of tertiary education or political interest, but in the opposite direction. For the long-term unemployed women, gender ideology has no effect as can be seen by the fact that the AME is very close to the zero line and by the confidence intervals that largely overlap the zero on both ends.

Figure 3.

Average Marginal Effect of main predictors for each employment status (with 95% Cls).

We also note here that the measure of gender ideology has large confidence intervals that are due to measurement uncertainty. Nonetheless, for precariously employed women the negative impact of gender ideologies that are supportive of a male breadwinner model is clear. Furthermore, for the regularly employed women, the true coefficients of the variables measuring gender beliefs are expected to remain in the negative side, the confidence interval only slightly cuts the zero line. This means that we can be confident that the more egalitarian the ideology is, the more likely it is that both the regularly and the precariously employed women will participate in political consumerism. Surprisingly, we also find that gender ideology has no effect on unemployed young women political consumerism.

Discussion and conclusion

The main line of inquiry examines the effect of gender ideology on young women’s political consumerism. Gender ideology is defined as beliefs that young women hold regarding women’s and men’s involvement in paid and care work and is measured with a variable confronting views on female and male involvement in paid employment and care work, assessing support for female breadwinner, dual-earner, and male breadwinner (Davis and Greenstein, 2009). Our measures allows us to measure egalitarian views when young women evaluate in the same way women and men involvement in the labor market while having young children, but also to assess for a more empowering view related to a female breadwinner model (support for female full-time work while having children, but not for male) or a more traditional support for a male breadwinner model (support for male full-time work, but not for female). Following the post-modernization theory, we hypothesized that women who hold a more egalitarian gender ideology are more active in terms of political consumerism than those who hold a more traditional ideology. A second set of hypotheses regards the interaction between gender ideology and employment status. We hypothesized that long-term unemployed women would hold less egalitarian gender beliefs, which are more congruent with their current situation of joblessness, and thus would be less active in political consumerism (hypothesis 2a). However, we were unsure about the effects of incongruence and left it open. Finally, we expected that for precariously employed women, the effects of gender ideology would be the same as for regularly employed ones (hypothesis 2b)

The results of our multivariate analysis, controlling for the predictors of women’s political participation that we identified in the literature on women’s political participation, confirmed hypothesis 1, which states that the more egalitarian the women are in their gender ideology, the more likely they are to participate in political consumerism. The predictors we use to measure gender ideology contribute to predicting young women’s political consumerism. This finding confirms a previous finding by Burns et al. (2001) that normative beliefs about the division of work within the household affect political participation. However, the effects of gender ideology are much higher than expected because they are comparable to those of education or political interest. Thus, gender ideology appears to be an important predictor to consider when assessing young women’s participation in political consumerism.

However, the story is more complex, as anticipated in hypothesis 2a. These effects vary depending on one’s employment status. Following the literature (Davis, 2007), we argue that women adapt their gender ideology to their current situation to reduce the psychological burden of unemployment. In fact, Bolzendahl and Myers (2004) suggest that employment plays an important role in predicting egalitarian gender ideology. Indeed, we find that unemployed women tend to be slightly less egalitarian. However, more interestingly, we uncover different effects of gender ideology for the employed and the unemployed young women. Although in the case of the precariously employed young women, and to some extent for the regularly employed, being more egalitarian fosters participation, for the long-term unemployed women, this is not the case.

Therefore, support for dual-earner models triggers political participation only when it is matched by the presence of having a job (standard employment or temporary one). We argue that this is due to coherence between women’s belief and their actual situation. In the absence of coherence, we do not find this effect. The coherence between personal status and gender ideology induces a political impact. Women without a stable income who support the idea of a male breadwinner model are less active than their counterparts.

However, the behavior of precariously employed young women is the most intriguing finding. In particular, we unexpectedly find the highest impact of gender ideology for precariously employed women. This finding helps us better understand this job condition that is otherwise similar to standard workers in terms of gender beliefs. Thus, these women are able to perceive their working condition as empowering. When holding an egalitarian gender belief, they are even more active than employed women holding analogous beliefs. On the other hand, when holding a male as breadwinner stance, they translate their job condition into a decrease in political activity, considering their income as not being enough. This is in line with the idea that there are ‘small cumulative differences in resources growing out of a host of institutions’ (Burns, 2007: 111), on the one side, the temporary job condition, and on the other the gender belief per se.

The main limitations of our study relates to its focus on one form of political participation and the use of a unique dataset that allows us to compare three employment statuses but forces us to focus on a specific group of women who are young and who live in particular European cities. Further research should pursue the analysis of gender ideology on other forms of political participation, beyond political consumerism and test it on party activities (still dominated by men) and voting (the most common form of participation among both women and men). This would provide a more complete picture of the effects of gender ideology on women’s political participation. Better understanding how ideologies related to one’s role in society affect political participation would contribute greatly to the study of the determinants of political participation. The more we know about the effects of specific stances regarding one’s role in society, the better we can understand participation or the lack thereof by different social groups and the roots of inequalities in terms of political participation.

In addition, our study prompts future research to include gender beliefs in the study of women’s political participation more broadly. Future studies could extend this finding by testing it on older women as well as on women residing in rural areas. Including women who live outside of the urban context should not change our results. However, when working with women living in both urban and rural areas, we might expect to find more housewives, who are not included in the sample we use here, and perhaps will also see more women holding less egalitarian beliefs due to adaptive strategies or more conservative social backgrounds.

The comparison of three employment statuses showed the relevance of analyzing different forms of employment that correspond to contemporary employment trends. The literature on precarious employment is a growing field of research, so future research will be able to address more precisely the specific situation of precarious workers with regards to political participation. We consider the specific finding on precariously employed young women – who benefit most from an egalitarian gender ideology – to be of great relevance as it contributes to understanding some specificities of this group who is neither completely included nor completely excluded from the labor market. In particular, our finding reveals that precariously employed cannot be treated as similar to regularly employed or unemployed youth, they form a specific group which should be studied more in-depth. Additionally, future research should be devoted to young women working part-time to account for the specific status of women in the labor market. Research on the political participation of precariously employed workers remains rather limited, and as more knowledge is gained regarding the political behavior of this group, it can be integrated into the study of women’s political participation.

Footnotes

Appendix

Appendix 3.

Gender ideology, respondents distribution by employment status (frequencies).

scale	Unemployed women	Precariously employed women	Regularly employed women	All sample
Mean	1.58	1.09	1.25	1.29
−5	2.13	1.68	1.29	1.68
−4	1.48	0.98	0.86	1.09
−3	1.15	1.40	1.15	1.24
−2	2.95	2.52	2.59	2.67
−1	2.46	4.34	1.44	2.77
0	42.46	48.60	49.78	47.15
1	5.08	9.52	9.50	8.17
2	13.61	9.80	10.07	11.05
3	9.02	5.74	6.62	7.03
4	5.25	4.48	5.47	5.05
5	4.10	4.76	4.60	4.51
6	2.13	1.96	2.16	2.08
7	1.97	1.12	1.44	1.49
8	1.15	1.12	1.01	1.09
9	1.15	1.12	0.43	0.89
10	3.93	0.84	1.58	2.03
Total	100%	100%	100%
N	610	714	695	2019

T-test reveals statistically significant differences in the means between unemployed and other (p = .001), precarious and others (p = .012), but not between employed and the other two groups (p = .606).

Chi-square test (p = .001) and adjusted residuals are used to signal important differences in the expected counts in the different cells, bold used for higher than expected (AR larger than 1.96) and italics for lower than expected (AR smaller than 1.96).

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Marco Giugni, Simone Baglioni, Lara Monticelli and Christian Lahusen, and all participants at the YOUNEX seminar (Milan, March 2013) and the six anonymous referees for comments on earlier versions of this article. All remaining errors are the responsibility of the authors. We would also like to thank Céline Colombo for careful reading and for helpful advices.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Results presented in this article have been obtained within the project ‘Youth, Unemployment, and Exclusion in Europe: A Multidimensional Approach to Understanding the Conditions and Prospects for Social and Political Integration of Young Unemployed’ (YOUNEX). This project was funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme (grant agreement no. 216122).

Notes

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