A study conducted at San Diego State University (SDSU) reveals that working moms are now more socially accepted in the US, by both children and adults, than ever before.
Researchers at SDSU led by the university’s psychology professor, Jean Twenge, analyzed the data from over 600,000 surveyees to understand how the general attitude towards women working and taking care of the family has changed over the past four decades in the United States.
The team of researchers obtained data from two nationally representative surveys, one of 12th graders and the other of adults, taken from 1976 to 2013.
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It was revealed that the percentage of 12th grade children, who believed that preschoolers would suffer and face difficulties if their mothers worked, slipped from a whopping 59% in the 1970s to 34% in the 1990s to a mere 22% this decade, as quoted in Express Tribune.
Twenge commented that the trend was against the popular belief that millennial are set to “turn back the clock”. Instead, he stated that children were much more supportive of their working mothers than ever before.
It was further revealed in the survey that as compared to the year 1977, when 68% of the adult surveyees believed that preschoolers would suffer if their mothers worked, only 42% were of the same belief in 1998 and an even less, 35% more recently in 2012.
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Commenting on the results of the survey, Kristin Donnelly, the lead researcher on the team, stated, “In recent years, Americans have become much more supportive of men and women holding the same roles and responsibilities in the workplace as well as in child-rearing”.
According to Twenge and Donnelly, these results are the proof of growing gender equality and the cultural emphasis on individualism in the US. People are more tolerable of switching roles and have freed themselves from the shackles of “traditionally gendered conceptions of duty”.
Added to this were the stats that indicated that 12th graders held more patriarchal views of marriage in recent times as compared to back in the 1990s. Stats indicated that in 1995-1996, only 27% of the 12th grade students believed that men should work and women should take care of the family at home, as compared to the higher 32% of them in 2010-2013.
