You Have Got to Be Carefully Taught: The Effect of Parent’s Gender Role Performances on Indonesian Children’s Attitudes towards the Role of Women in the Private and Public Sphere

Iwu D. Utomo, Australian National University
Anna Reimondos, Australian National University
Ariane J. Utomo, Australian National University
Peter McDonald, Australian National University

The family is one of the primary places where children are socialized about the gendered behaviour and roles of men and women. In this paper we use data from a large scale survey of school children in Year 6 (N=1,837) and Year 12 (N= 6,555) from four provinces of Indonesia to examine how domestic task socialization in the home affects young people’s attitudes to gender roles in the public and private sphere. We find that particularly for Year 6 students, the level of self-reported involvement of their own fathers in household tasks, the more egalitarian their views regarding gender roles in the private sphere. Similarly, students with mothers who work are also more likely to disagree with the traditional breadwinner model of the division of labour.