Introduction

Gender ideology refers to societal beliefs that justify inequalities and differences across genders. Sociologists have studied shifts in gender ideology in the US since the late 20th century (Brooks and Bolzendahl, 2004; Cotter, Hermsen and Vanneman, 2011). The US provides a particularly interesting context for study because it is characterized by a relatively robust women's movement that has made historic gains in gender equality and women's empowerment. However, the march toward gender equality in the US has been rough and uneven. Progress was made in the 1970s and 1980s as women became more prominent in sectors of the economy that were previously dominated by men. At the same time, many Americans became more accepting of working mothers and economically empowered, independent women. However, American attitudes regarding gender equality trended downward in the 1990s, and grew slowly upward in subsequent years. Why did attitudes regarding gender equality trend downward, and then grow slowly upward, despite years of steady progress toward gender equality?

Some sociological research has addressed this question, connecting the observed trends in gender ideology to changing conditions in the US labour market and shifting perceptions of motherhood among women. However, these connections overlook other important cultural changes that have occurred in the US since the late 20th century, changes which may better explain the observed trends in gender ideology. Here we refer to the substantial decline of Mainline Protestantism and the tremendous growth of the religiously unaffiliated population. Mainline Protestantism began to decline in the late 20th century, while the religiously unaffiliated population began to grow at a quick pace in the mid-1990s. In this chapter, we ask how these cultural changes are related to the trends in gender ideology since the late 1970s, with a specific focus on the reversal in the trend toward gender egalitarianism in the mid-1990s, and the slow growth of gender egalitarianism throughout the 2000s. We begin our investigation with a deeper discussion of gender ideology and religious change in the US since the late 20th century. Subsequently, we apply a constrained age-period-cohort model to several decades of data from the General Social Survey (GSS) to evaluate the effect that religious change has had on gender ideology in the US.