Does Parental Education Relate to Children's Attitudes about Gender Equality?

Abstract

In the present thesis, I investigate the relation between parental education and children’s gender attitudes in Norway and Poland. This study used a cross-sectional questionnaire from 1542 high school students (462 Norwegian and 1080 Polish; 715 boys and 827 girls; 697 were 16 years old, 739 were 17 years old and 106 were 18 years old). By conducting multivariate general linear models and regression analysis on the data, this study contributes to our understanding of the influence of parental education level on adolescents' gender attitudes by showing that (a) the importance of parental education in shaping adolescents’ equal gender attitudes, girls report less hostile sexism when their parental education level is higher. (b) parental education has a significant positive effect on gender essentialism, which means that a higher parental education level is related to more support for gender essentialism. (c) sons report more support for gender essentialism when their paternal education level is higher, and Polish adolescents report more support for gender essentialism when their maternal education level is higher. This thesis contributes to the fact that parental education is related to children's attitudes toward gender equality. And we suggest that future society should narrow educational gaps to promote gender equality.