Trends in gender beliefs in Romania: 1993-2008

Abstract

The impact of modernization and industrialization on gender arrangements has been different depending on the gender culture that predominated when the modernization process started. Romania was among the most rural societies in Europe after the Second World War. Women's involvement in agricultural activity was very high, but the gender division of work was a very traditional one. The communist regimes promoted a full employment policy for the entire population but did nothing to encourage gender equality in the private space. This article focuses on the Romanian case, aiming to identify the dynamics of gender beliefs during the post-communist period. Using data from two waves of the European Values Survey (1990, 1999), as well as data provided by the Public Opinion Barometer 2007 and by Family Life - 2008, the authors carried out standard cohort decomposition methods in order to detect the mechanism that produced the most variation in gender beliefs. (author's abstract)