Gender knowledge in egalitarian and traditional families

In the present paper, a small sample of 27 two-parent families who were self-identified as sharing parenting equally are compared with a more traditional set of 42 two-parent families. Both samples were primarily Caucasian. Children from the egalitarian families adopted gender labels later during the second year of life and showed less sex role knowledge at age 4 than the children in the more traditional families. Fathers in the egalitarian sample were more liberal on the Attitudes Toward Women Scale than fathers in the F-L study. Fathers in the egalitarian sample interacted with their child 50% of the time (on an equal basis with the mothers), while fathers in the F-L sample contributed only 25% of the parent—child interaction. Boys in the F-L sample received more negative reactions, but this was not true in the egalitarian families. The point is made that it is fathers who are behaving differently in the egalitarian sample; the mothers in both samples were very similar in both attitudes and behaviors.The research reported in this paper was supported in part by the following grants: HD 17571 from the National Institute of Child Development, MH 37911 from the National Institute of Mental Health, and a grant from the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon awarded to the first author.We would like to thank Rachel Robertson and Jennifer Strayer for their help in collecting the data from the Shared Parenting families.