ABSTRACT
How do college students in the United States feel about sex roles? This chapter focuses on the results of a survey of a sample of U.S. undergraduate students concerning their attitudes toward the roles of women and men in the labor market and in the home. Learning more about people’s views is important because, although mainstream economists emphasize the role of rational choices, behavior tends to be constrained by beliefs about what is or should be normal. Some sociologists even speak of “normative imperatives” (Thornton 1989, p. 889). Others make the more modest claim that traditional beliefs serve to reinforce the tendency of people to maintain habitual practices (Anderson, Bechhofer, and Gershuny 1994) and conclude that there is “lagged adaptation” (Gershuny, Godwin, and Jones 1994). Learning more about the opinions of college students is important because it is the highly educated who have been at the forefront of changing sex-role attitudes (Goldscheider and Waite 1991).
