We are looking forward to attending the conference “Changing Gender Inequalities, Changing Families?”, which will be held in Leuven, Belgium, on 7-8 December 2017.
Our talk will focus on the relationship between education and men’s involvement in homework and child care. In particular, we will present a joint paper entitled Studying Care, Doing Care: Does Type of Education Affect Men’s Involvement in Unpaid Work? A Comparison between Norway, Austria and Poland. Among the vast literature on the gender division of unpaid work and the so-called “new fathers”, it is a consolidated evidence that not only her but also his level of education matter. However, although shown relevant for other behaviors such as first union or first child, to the best of our knowledge no study has so far examined the role of type of education for men’s share of domestic and care work. By drawing from the Generation and Gender Survey and by comparing three countries (Norway, Austria and Poland) with distinctive cultural and institutional settings, in this paper we focus on couples with young children and we explore whether, controlling for his and her level of education and labor market position, there is a higher time involvement in unpaid work among men trained in fields in which a large majority of students are women and where traditional stereotypical female qualities prevail such as those concerned with the care of individuals and/or which emphasize interpersonal skills compared to those in male-dominated technical fields.
This conference will be the closing event of the interesting project “Implications of the Shifting Gender Balance in Education for Reproductive Behaviour in Europe” (GENDERBALL), funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme. The conference will take place at the Faculty Club in Leuven and currently there are about 50 confirmed participants from Europe and North America.
We thank Jan Van Bavel, principal investigator of the project, for this invitation.