Employment History, the Sex Typing of Occupations, Pay and Change in Gender-Role Attitudes: A Longitudinal Study of Young Married Women

In this paper we probe the extent to which three dimensions of employment, employment history, occupational segregation by gender and pay cause young married women's gender-role attitudes to change over time. The longitudinal data are drawn from the Youth Cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Labor Market Experience and cover a five-year period (1982–87) for a national sample of 2,499 married women aged 22 to 29 in 1987. The results show that (1) employed women became less traditional than other women in their views of appropriate roles for women, (2) the sex typing of occupations does not appear consequential for women's gender-role attitudes over time and (3) both pay levels and increases in pay alter gender-role attitudes.