Gender Ideologies: Insights into Health and Demographic Behaviors.

Abstract

The global agenda set at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo called upon researchers and program implementers to address the effects of gender inequality, especially the way inequality shapes sexual and reproductive health and demographic processes. Since then, researchers have documented links between women’s relative disadvantage and negative sexual and reproductive health outcomes. Less attention has been given to the systems of belief, or gender ideologies, that legitimate ongoing gender inequality. Yet, gender inequality would be unsustainable without supporting beliefs and values that define men and women as different and unequal. Those ideational aspects of gender systems—beliefs, values, attitudes, and norms—are the subject of this dissertation. The three empirical chapters investigate trends in attitudes concerning gender relations or connections between those attitudes and health and demographic behaviors. The first paper examines worldwide trends in attitudes about violence against women. Women in low-income countries have recently become less likely to justify intimate partner violence. The paper documents evidence that global cultural influences may be largely responsible for the observed trend in individual gender attitudes. The second paper uses survey data to test associations between men’s gender attitudes and their risk of HIV in Malawi. The analyses show that men with more egalitarian gender attitudes engage less frequently in sexual behaviors that involve risk of HIV transmission and report lower self-assessed risk of HIV. Finally, the third paper employs qualitative data from Malawi to explore the relevance of ideas about gender to men’s fertility. The paper demonstrates that gender norms are imbued with ideals relevant to men’s fertility preferences and behaviors. Each paper begins from the premise that ideational factors, such as social norms and individual attitudes, play an important role in shaping behavior, and are central to the perpetuation of gender inequality. All three papers use different measures of ideas about gender and all three posit that attention to these ideational elements is crucial to understanding individual motivations for health and demographic behaviors.