Social inclusion and attitudes to redistribution
Women’s attitudes in an era of transition
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.37062/sf.59.23870Keywords:
attitudes to redistribution, housewife era, social inclusion, care-oriented thinking, self-interestAbstract
The social rights of citizenship are conditioned on labor market participation. While quite a lot of research has focused on how, e.g., income and type of employment contract are related to attitudes towards welfare redistribution, less interest has been paid to the effect of being active on the labor at all, or not, for those attitudes. This study uses previously unexplored interview data with some 3,000 married women collected in 1968, at the time when married women entered the labor market in large numbers and the housewife era ended. Theoretically, the study departs from a discussion of self-interest and/or care oriented thinking as possible determinants of attitudes to redistribution. The results show that women who were active on the labor market, with control for other factors, tended to be more positive to redistribution than women in unpaid work. Translated into today’s discussion of why women tend to be more positive to redistribution than men, the results can be said to point away from explanations in terms of care-oriented thinking, and rather to factors like, e.g., self-interest.
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