The Impact of Religion on Gender-Role Attitudes

Given the apparently growing significance of religion in American life, the general problem addressed in this paper was the relation between religious orientation and gender-related attitudes and behaviors. More specifically, this study examined variation over a range of dimensions of gender-role attitudes held by women in predominantly female and predominantly male college majors using religious devoutness and other variables as predictors. Five dimensions of gender-role attitudes were used: familial roles, extrafamilial roles, male/female stereotypes, social change, and gender-role preference. No significanct difference was found between women in the two types of majors on any dimension of gender-role attitudes, Multiple regression revealed that religious devoutness was the most important variable among all those utilized in consistently predicting all five dimensions of gender-role attitudes.

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