IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp18459.html

Gender Role Attitudes and Marital Sorting: Implications for Household Inequality

Author

Listed:
  • Francesconi, Marco

    (University of Essex)

  • Nicoletti, Cheti

    (University of York)

  • Surana, Khushboo

    (University of York)

Abstract

We study the role of Gender Role Attitudes (GRA)—beliefs about appropriate roles for men and women—in marital sorting and intra-household allocations. Using the UK Household Longitudinal Study and a multidimensional matching model following Dupuy and Galichon (2014), we estimate the contribution of GRA to the joint marriage utility alongside age, education, BMI, height, health, personality traits, and risk preferences. We find that sorting on GRA is quantitatively important: its contribution to the joint utility is comparable in magnitude to that of education. We apply a decomposition that identifies three main indices underlying the joint utility, with GRA loading heavily on one of the dominant indices jointly with age and education. This GRA-related index strongly predicts subsequent allocations within marriage, including spouses’ shares of housework, childcare, earnings, and paid labour. These findings indicate that GRA are a central dimension of assortative matching and play a meaningful role in shaping intra-household behaviour and gendered labour market outcomes.

Suggested Citation

  • Francesconi, Marco & Nicoletti, Cheti & Surana, Khushboo, 2026. "Gender Role Attitudes and Marital Sorting: Implications for Household Inequality," IZA Discussion Papers 18459, IZA Network @ LISER.
    • Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18459
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://docs.iza.org/dp18459.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D13 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Household Production and Intrahouse Allocation
    • J12 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Marriage; Marital Dissolution; Family Structure
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18459. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Mark Fallak (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/izaaalu.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.