Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Gender role attitude is a personal view about what is the role that men and women should or could play in society and inside the family. This attitude is generated through socialization and learning process, substantially comes from education in family, school, media, working places and even policy making, and it would also affect people’s behavior and their way of thinking about gender relationships and gender equality. As West and Zimmerman (2009) make clear, gender is created in the actions men and women undertake to be accountable to the “current cultural conceptions of conduct becoming to—or compatible with the ‘essential natures’ of—a woman or a man” in the eyes of those they interact with. As a result, gender role attitude can be a social norm when people make decisions and react on gender issues, and it could also have a significant effect on micro-economic and gender-related policy decisions. Despite the prevalence of research which reveals that gender role values are a core component of the way Americans’ policy attitudes are shaped and also that state-level policies dictate a good deal of the inequality in American society, there are no sufficient studies or a vast quantity of data on Americans’ gender role attitudes. Considering the lack of studies on state-level gender role values, in the first part of this paper, I will address the questions: how should I measure gender role values at the state level? Do states exhibit similar levels of gender role attitudes? Do subnational levels gender role values fluctuate over time? I use multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) to create time varying, state level estimates of gender role attitudes to begin to answer these questions. It shows that although the gender attitudes aggregated at the national level appear to show little change between the early-1990s through 2016, there is are important dynamic changes at the state level--the dynamics are revealed when comparing states to one another, and when comparing states to themselves over time. With the state-level gender role attitudes, I can then study to what degree the change in budgeting for gender matches the trends for gender role values. In the second part of the paper, I plan to answer the questions that: have subnational budgeting for gender changed over time? Is the effect of gender role attitudes significant on shaping gender responsive budgeting at state-level? Do gender role attitudes indicating the preference for gender equality cause higher gender responsive budgeting? Do the two categories of gender role attitude make any difference on changing the state level budgeting for gender?