The Gender Aspects of Inter-Generational Transmission of Work Values - to Whom to Look up to?

Although research on intergenerational value transmission is a vivid field of research, we know relatively little about gender socialisation dynamics. This paper investigates to what extent gender aspects determine the intergenerational work value transmission within a family. Specifically, based on the topic salience perspective (Pinquart & Silbereisen, 2004) we examine whether the selectivity of work value transmission differs as a function of parents’ gender. Two partially conflictive theoretical approaches shall be tested: On the one hand, research suggests that value congruency is primarily determined by same-sex family relations, i.e. mothers transmit their values to their daughters, while fathers transmit their values to their sons (Chlosta et al. 2012). On the other hand, the literature suggests that fathers are regarded as the more important occupation-related role models, notwithstanding the fact that mothers might be working too (Linquist et al. 2012). Young people adopt their parental values quite selectively, based on which values are more salient to them. As a result, according to the second approach, work-value congruency should be higher in father-child dyads than in mother-child dyads irrespective of the sex of the child. We evaluate these conflicting theories by taking advantage of new international quantitative as well as qualitative data that enables us to follow a mixed methods approach. Drawing on an international survey of two generation dyads as well as an extensive qualitative data base of family interviews, we provide a comprehensive insight into the gender-dimension of the intergenerational value transmission.