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Examining barriers to men's communal orientation

University of British Columbia

Despite western societies’ considerable progress towards gender equality on many fronts, men and women remain divided on the extent to which they adopt care-oriented values and roles. Men tend to embrace basic communal values and traits (i.e., a focus on care and connection with others; Bakan, 1966) to a lesser extent than women do (e.g., Donnelly & Twenge, 2017; Falk & Hermle, 2018). At a more concrete level, men are also underrepresented in communal careers in healthcare, early education, and in domestic roles (HEED; Croft, Schmader, & Block, 2015). In the three empirical chapters of my dissertation, I examine some of the processes that constrain men’s internalization of communal values, and, in turn, how men’s relatively lower communal values have downstream consequences for their engagement with communal careers. Chapter 2 focuses on the role of automatic communal=female stereotypes in curtailing men’s personal identification with communal values. The findings I present suggest that gender differences in identification with communal values are especially large among those who hold such stereotypes, and that retraining men to associate communion with males as a group also increases their personal identification with communal values. Chapter 3, in turn, focuses on understanding gender differences in communion from a developmental perspective. Results from a study of 411 children suggest that, by age six, boys see themselves as less communal than do girls, a difference in fundamental values that also predicts how children envision their future prioritization of career- over family-roles. Given such early gender differences in communal values, Chapter 4 focuses on understanding how relatively low communal values, in conjunction with more external norms, might deter men from taking on communal careers. Findings suggest that communal values and the overrepresentation of women in HEED both play important roles in deterring men from HEED careers.

Text

2021-08-31

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/75656

Psychology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/