Attitudes towards Women’s Paid Labor and Children in East Asia

Abstract

Using data from the 2012 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) fourth module on family and changing gender roles, the authors explore cross-national differences in the prevalence of non-traditional attitudes towards women’s paid labor and children’s interference in parents’ lives in China, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. Their results show that variation in attitude configurations and their determinants differ across each setting in ways that are inconsistent with existing theoretical explanations formulated to explain both macro- and micro-level mechanisms of differences in attitudes. The authors therefore propose a paradigm shift in cross-national attitudinal research along the lines proposed by the Theory of Conjunctural Action (TCA), which recognizes the path-dependent interplay of local schematic and material elements of social structure that operate at multiple levels of analysis.