Gender ideology and unpaid labor : empirical evidence from pandemic and reproductive contexts

Firl, Katrin

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URN:	urn:nbn:de:bsz:180-madoc-727571
Document Type:	Doctoral dissertation
Year of publication:	2026
Place of publication:	Mannheim
University:	Universität Mannheim
Evaluator:	Pollak, Reinhard
Date of oral examination:	2026
Publication language:	English
Institution:	School of Social Sciences > Soziologie (Pollak 2019-)
Subject:	300 Social sciences, sociology, anthropology
Keywords (English):	gender ideology , unpaid labor , contraceptive labor , COVID-19 pandemic , Germany
Abstract:	Gender ideology and the gendered division of labor are closely intertwined and central to understanding persistent gender inequality within heterosexual relationships. While women’s participation in education and paid employment has increased substantially, unpaid labor remains unequally distributed, with women continuing to shoulder most housework, childcare, and other often invisible forms of labor. This dissertation’s overarching aim is to investigate the reciprocal relationship between individual gender ideology, operationalized through gender role attitudes (GRAs), and the division of unpaid labor. This dissertation examines this relationship in two specific contexts. First, the COVID-19 pandemic is treated as an exogenous shock that altered couples’ work and family arrangements and thus provides a context for reducing endogeneity in the study of attitudes and behavior. The pandemic makes it possible to observe how changing constraints in everyday life relate to the formation of gender attitudes and to shifts in the division of housework and childcare. Second, the dissertation extends the study of unpaid labor to the reproductive sphere by analyzing contraceptive labor as an overlooked and gendered dimension of relationship labor that is disproportionately borne by women in heterosexual relationships. The three separate dissertation papers contribute to these goals in complementary ways. Papers 1 and 2 use the pandemic context to examine the relationship between attitudes and behavior. Paper 1 analyzes whether cognitive dissonance emerging during the COVID-19 pandemic is associated with GRA changes. Paper 2 investigates how pre-pandemic gender ideology shaped the division of housework and childcare during the pandemic and whether it moderated the influences of changes in time availability on unpaid labor. Paper 3 shifts the focus to reproduction and explores women’s method-level contraceptive labor as a distinct dimension of unpaid labor, linking it to established micro-level predictors of the gendered division of labor. All papers draw on high-quality, representative German (panel) data, namely pairfam (papers 1 and 2) and FReDA (paper 3). Together, they show that also in the context of reduced endogeneity the relationship between gender ideology and unpaid labor is dynamic, context-dependent, and extends beyond conventional domains such as housework and childcare. By integrating attitudinal, behavioral, and reproductive dimensions, this dissertation contributes to a broader understanding of gender inequality in intimate relationships and provides a basis for future research on overlooked forms of unpaid labor, reciprocal processes of attitude and behavior, and the role of external constraints.