ABSTRACT
Attitudes toward men’s and women’s roles have been referred to as gender ideologies (Hochschild, 1989). A traditional gender ideology maintains that men’s sphere is work and women’s sphere is the home. The implicit assumption is that men have greater power than women. An egalitarian gender ideology maintains that power is distributed equally between women and men, and women and men identify equally with the same spheres. There could be an equal emphasis on home, on work, or on some combination of the two. Most people’s attitudes toward men’s and women’s roles lie somewhere between traditional and egalitarian. Thus, Hochschild identified a third gender ideology, transitional . A typical transitional attitude toward gender roles is that it is acceptable for women to devote energy to both work and family domains, but women should hold proportionally more responsibility for the home, and men should focus proportionally more of their energy on work.
