No progress! How gender stereotypes ‘are strong as ever’

HIS wife may appreciate him helping with the housework and looking after the children – but New Man gets little credit elsewhere.

For despite the rise of career women and house husbands, the old gender stereotypes are j ust as strong as ever, research claims.

We are just as likely to ascribe traditional roles to the sexes today as we were more than 30 years ago. And, if anything, housework and childcare are more likely to be viewed as women’s work now than in the past, the US research found.

For the study, researchers from New York University quizzed almost 200 men and women about how likely a man or a woman was to have certain physical or emotional traits, have a particular occupation or take on various jobs around the home. Their answers were compared with those given by a group of students in 1983.

Despite apparent advances in equality, the answers were largely the same. For

‘Repairs still a man’s work’

instance, car maintenance and repairs were as likely to be seen as man’s work today as the 1980s.

And tasks such as household chores and childcare were regarded as more a woman’s preserve than in the past, with men today believed to be even less likely to do their share.

However, some perceptions did change over the decades, the all-female team of researchers, writing in Psychology of Women Quarterly, found.

Responsibility for finances was seen to be more evenly divided between the sexes, with women now regarded as capable as men of making big decisions about money.

The researchers wrote: ‘Changes in activities and representations of women and men in society have unquestionably occurred since the 1980s; however these changes have apparently not been sufficient to alter strongly held beliefs about the basic social category of gender.’