Gender labor market competition challenges young men’s support for gender equality

There is a consensus in research that young generations hold more progressive values than older generations, especially about cultural issues such as gender equality. Contrasting this consensus, studies find that young men recently develop increasingly conservative attitudes toward certain gender equality measures. Addressing this paradox, we argue that increasing labor market competition between young men and women explains young men’s recently more conservative attitudes toward gender equality. To test this argument, we investigate young men’s attitudes toward different aspects of gender equality over time. Specifically, analyzing cross-sectional and longitudinal survey data from several Western democracies since the 1990s, we develop and test three implications of our argument. First, regarding the temporal dimension of this trend, we argue that young men's increasing conservatism on certain gender equality indicators emerged concurrently with the trend that young women increasingly outperform young men in terms of educational achievement. Second, we argue that young men increasingly counter-react to gender equality indicators that imply competition between men and women, but not to other gender equality indicators. Third, we argue that a young man will become less conservative on such gender equality indicators, as his education and income levels rise, reducing his vulnerability to labor market competition. Our findings corroborate our theoretical argument, suggesting that gender labor market competition explains young men's increasingly conservative attitudes toward gender equality. Importantly, these findings imply that progressive generational value change cannot be taken for granted, and despite their general progressiveness, young generations are not exempt from conservative reactions to labor market competition.