Differences in gender role attitudes between native Swedish and immigrants

Abstract

The cultural adaption of immigrants in European countries has been drawing significant attention since it is an important dimension of their integration with the local society. Under the Swedish context, a Scandinavian welfare state that emphasizes egalitarianism, whether immigrants perceive gender roles in the same way the native do is a vital question which captures the extent of immigrants acculturation. Regarding this, abundant studies brought opinions both theoretically and empirically in recent years. They stressed the familial influence and intergenerational transmission effect whereas less underlying mechanisms or a complete picture had been demonstrated. This study aims to figure out familial influence on the formation of adolescents gender role attitudes and its effect on the native-immigrant gap. Parents socioeconomic status, integration and mothers labor force participation had been laid emphasis on to understand this question. The parent-child dyad data from the first wave of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey in Four European Countries enabled this study to make a deeper analysis on the effect of intergenerational transmission.

The analysis suggests that comparing with adolescents personal characteristics, the influence they acquired from family contributes more to the native-immigrant gap in gender role attitudes. Immigrant adolescents own integration and religiosity only have limited impact on their conservative gender ideology. Adolescents school performance is an influential factor but cannot explain the native-immigrant gap. However, identical with previous studies, parents gender role attitudes have a high correlation and consistency with the adolescents. Traditional immigrant parents are more likely to have traditional children. To give a more understandable interpretation, this study considered parents characteristics and found out that educational background and language proficiency, especially the ability of understanding Swedish play important roles positively on forming immigrants gender role attitudes and furtherly transmit to the adolescents. Moreover, in a family, the parents role modelling effect also gives an impact. When the mother is working, the more parents spend time and interact with their children, the more likely their children to have egalitarian gender role attitudes.