Consistent Egalitarianism or Heterogeneous Belief Patterns? Gender Ideologies in Contemporary East and West Germany

1 Introduction

International research has identified a ‘stalled gender revolution’ in the area of gender roles since the late twentieth century in the USA and large parts of Europe, including Germany (Esping-Andersen 2009; England 2010; Goldscheider et al. 2015; Brinton & Lee 2016; Sullivan et al. 2018). This is not in line with the predictions of modernization theory, which assumes continuous progress in gender equality (Inglehart & Welzel 2005). In the case of gender role behaviors, the stalled gender revolution refers to the increased gender equality in education or labor force participation, but a failure to reach equality in the area of unpaid care work, which is still predominantly performed by women (Samtleben 2019; Schulz 2021; Vargha et al. 2023). The pervasiveness of beliefs that suppose innate gendered abilities might have contributed to this development. This is because beliefs are the basis for behavioral decisions (Ajzen & Fishbein 1973) which have been shown to influence, amongst others, the employment trajectories of women and the division of childcare and housework in families (for an overview see Chatillon et al. 2018; Davis & Greenstein 2009).^[1] This makes their investigation and that of their predictors important for understanding persistent gender inequality in work and family behavior. Furthermore, international research shows that also beliefs regarding gender roles have long been subject to a steady liberalization, but one which has been leveled off since the 1990s (Cotter et al. 2011).

In the search for explanations for the stalled gender revolution, or the leveling off of egalitarian developments in beliefs regarding gender roles, there is agreement that a one-dimensional understanding of beliefs as a consistent structure ranging between traditional and egalitarian – methodically implemented mostly through summative belief indices – is over-simplistic.^[2] Therefore, recent and mainly international comparative studies use an adapted way of examining beliefs regarding gender roles, in which the conceptualization of gender ideology as a latent construct makes it possible to consider various belief dimensions (Chatillon et al. 2018). These studies show, first, that in addition to the traditional or egalitarian gender ideology, which include consistent traditional or egalitarian beliefs regarding the various dimensions, there has been a diversification in beliefs regarding gender roles. This is because heterogeneous belief patterns have emerged in which beliefs on multiple dimensions are structured independently of each other. Here, for example, an endorsement of gender equality in the public domain, e.g. in terms of paid work, is combined with varying degrees of support for gender equality in the private domain. A second finding has been that the gender revolution in beliefs has not come to a halt. There is still a trend toward egalitarianism, as the consistent traditional ideology has been replaced by heterogeneous belief patterns (Cotter et al. 2011; Knight & Brinton 2017; Grunow et al. 2018; Pepin & Cotter 2018; Scarborough et al. 2019).

Germany is a particularly interesting case for examining heterogeneous belief patterns due to the former division of the country, which was associated with very different norms and policies on maternal employment and childcare (Rosenfeld et al. 2004), and decades after reunification, differences in beliefs persist between East and West Germany (Ebner et al. 2020; Sievers & Warner 2022; Zoch 2021). In addition, the German family policy framework has undergone considerable transformation since the early 2000s, in that maternal employment and extra-familial childcare are more strongly encouraged, while certain policies promoting the male breadwinner model are maintained (Pfau-Effinger 2018). Political support for different work-family ideals might be accompanied by heterogeneous belief patterns on gender roles, which can most appropriately be captured empirically by latent class analysis (LCA). However, gender ideology studies that apply this method to the German case are still scarce and they seldom differentiate between East and West Germany or investigate the socio-demographic characteristics of people who hold a particular ideology in the two regions (see Barth & Trübner 2018; Sievers & Warner 2022). The latter is crucial in order to understand predictors that contribute to a trend toward egalitarianism.

Moreover, the few existing studies that explicitly analyze the multidimensionality of gender ideology in Germany utilizing LCA are based on data collected more than ten years ago (Barth & Trübner 2018; Sievers & Warner 2022; Diabaté et al. 2023). Recent data on the multiple dimensions of gender ideology and their interplay are instructive against the background of the significant changes in family life that took place during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the first Covid-19 wave, German educational and childcare facilities were shut down, and at the same time many employees were asked to work from home, which led to an increase in paternal, but also maternal childcare time (Boll et al. 2021; Kreyenfeld & Zinn 2021). These experiences could have long-term effects on gender ideologies, such as a stronger endorsement of a gendered division of labor. At the moment, however, it is unclear what the current, i.e. post-Covid-19 pandemic, status of multidimensional gender ideologies in Germany is. Another argument for the importance of current data is that political changes, such as the expansion of day-care in Germany since the early 2000s, set normative orientation points for gender roles (Sjöberg 2004; Gangl & Ziefle 2015). Research on Germany has shown that certain policy changes have had short-term impacts on particular dimensions of gender ideology. For example, the introduction of a fathers’ quota within the paid parental leave scheme in 2007 led to less support for the statement that mothers should be more concerned about their family than about their career among grandmothers (not among grandfathers) in East and West Germany (Unterhofer & Wrohlich 2017). The substantial expansion of public childcare since the mid-2000s led to more egalitarian beliefs regarding maternal employment among mothers without a college degree in West Germany (not in East Germany) (Zoch & Schober 2018), and the extension of parental leave to three years in 1992 led mothers in West Germany to judge work as less central to their lives (Gangl & Ziefle 2015). As it is conceivable that policy-induced norm-setting may evolve more strongly over time (Sjöberg 2004; Gangl & Ziefle 2015), a re-examination of multidimensional gender ideologies based on recent data may yield important insights.

This study extends the aforementioned research by a) providing very recent insights into the prevalence of gender ideologies in Germany using representative data from FReDA – the Family Demography Panel Study (Schneider et al. 2021; Bujard et al. 2023b) – from the year 2021, b) by examining the multidimensionality of gender ideology using the person-centered approach of LCA, and c) by investigating whether the gender ideologies of people who live in East or West Germany vary, and whether the associations between socio-demographic characteristics, especially gender, and gender ideology differ within the regions.

The article is structured as follows. First, the German context will be discussed. Then the theoretical and empirical state of research on gender ideologies (in East and West Germany) will be reviewed and expectations for the present study will be derived. Afterwards, a description of the FReDA data and the method of the three-step approach of LCA is provided. Finally, the results will be presented and discussed.

2 Contextualizing the German Case Study

There are still clear differences in gender roles between East and West Germany which can be traced back to its division into a state-socialist East and a capitalist West from 1949 until reunification in 1990. The extensive labor market and childcare policies of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the East resulted in very high institutional childcare rates and high levels of labor force participation of women and mothers. However, despite the presence of many policies aimed at reconciling women’s full-time work and family lives, an egalitarian division of unpaid work in the family was not achieved. In the GDR, women were mainly responsible for housework and childcare, although they usually worked to the same extent as men (Trappe 1996). In contrast, the policies of the former Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) supported the male breadwinner model, with women focusing on the care of the household and children (Rosenfeld et al. 2004). Still today, maternal employment, as well as the availability and acceptance of extra-familial childcare, is significantly higher in East than in West Germany, and people in the East still hold more egalitarian beliefs regarding gender roles than those in the West (Barth et al. 2020; Ebner et al. 2020). In 2022, in East Germany the institutional childcare rate of children under three was 53 %, the employment rate of mothers (in 2018) with minors was 74 %, with most mothers working full-time. At the same time, in West Germany, the childcare rate for under-threes was 32 %, and the maternal employment rate was 68 %, which in most cases meant part-time work (BMFSFJ 2020, 2023).

In addition, reunified Germany has undergone a paradigm shift in family policy since the early 2000s, mainly due to the following factors: the introduction of a total of 14 months’ paid parental leave, including a quota for fathers in 2007 and the expansion of day-care particularly for under-threes which, since 2013, has included the right to day-care places from the age of one (Blum et al. 2022). A planned two-week paid paternity leave immediately after the birth of a child from 2024, and an agreed legal entitlement to full-time childcare for primary school children from 2026 are further steps to support working parents and promote gender equality. At the same time, there are still political, as well as labor market-related factors in Germany that encourage a gender-specific division of labor, such as the system of joint income taxation that favors single earner families, an insufficient supply of day-care places especially for under-threes or school-aged children and the widespread existence of the ideal worker norm, which expects fathers to work full-time, to work overtime, and to always be available for their employer (Rosenfeld et al. 2004; Williams et al. 2013; Gangl & Ziefle 2015). Most parents in Germany live the ‘male breadwinner/female part-time carer’ model (Pfau-Effinger 2018; BMFSFJ 2020). West Germans appear to be satisfied with this model (Florean & Engelhardt 2020), but it is often associated with negative long-term consequences for women’s wages and derived entitlements, as well as their careers as a whole (OECD 2017).

This gendered division of labor also persisted during the closures of school and childcare institutions due to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Mothers were more likely than fathers to reduce their working hours, they continued to do more housework, and took on the greater share of childcare (Hipp & Bünning 2021). This was despite the fact that fathers – particularly those with low- and medium-levels of education, who were more likely to be on short-time work or not employed – increased their childcare time compared to the pre-pandemic period (but mothers did so also) (Boll et al. 2021; Kreyenfeld & Zinn 2021). However, the increase in paternal childcare time was not sustained, as it was no longer observed in the following months (Boll et al. 2021). According to current evidence, there were no lasting changes in beliefs regarding gender roles. Fathers’ support for maternal employment declined significantly in West Germany at the time of the strictest closures of childcare and educational institutions (there were no changes for mothers and East Germans), but rose sharply again in the following period (Huebener et al. 2022).

Generally speaking, there are three main factors that render the investigation of multidimensional gender ideologies in Germany on the basis of current data a fruitful terrain for research. The first is the transformation of the political framework, which currently offers ambivalent orientations with regard to gender roles, as some policies promote the male-breadwinner model and others the dual-earner model. This heterogeneity is exacerbated by the structural and normative differences that still exist between East and West Germany. Second, the impact of the pro-equality family policies in recent years on multidimensional gender ideologies may not have been fully captured in previous studies utilizing LCA, as these only evolve over time, but the studies use data from ten years ago. Third, many months after families’ experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic, it is worth examining whether multidimensional gender ideologies are consistent with those before the pandemic or whether differences can be observed.

3 Theoretical Perspectives, Expectations and Previous Research

4 Data and Method

5 Results

According to the fit and diagnostic statistics (see Appendix Table A2) and the provision of reasonable interpretation possibilities, for West Germany the 4-class solution emerges as the best fit to the data. This is because the values of the adjusted BIC improve considerably up to the 4-class-solution, and only marginally thereafter. Also, the VLMR-LR test shows that the 4-class solution fits significantly better than the 3-class solution. In addition, an entropy value of 0.71 indicates a satisfactory precision of the classification of individuals into the four classes. In the sample of people living in East Germany, there is not a very clear class solution. If the model selection is guided by the VLMR-LR test, a 2-class solution is superior to a 3-class solution, and especially with the 2-class solution the adjusted BIC improves significantly and only moderately thereafter. The two classes can be clearly distinguished from one another (entropy of 0.73).

Figures 1A (West Germany) and 1B (East Germany) show the class sizes or the prevalence of the various gender ideologies, as well as the conditional probabilities for egalitarian/non-essentialist responses (plotted between 0 and 1 on the x-axis) to each of the eight indicators (given on the y-axis). In these figures, a high probability of egalitarian responses on the indicators ‘child suffers’, ‘focus on family’, and ‘relationship’ can be interpreted as an endorsement of maternal employment. A high probability for egalitarian/non-essentialist answers to the indicators ‘politics’, ‘university’ and ‘job’ reflects support for gender equality in the public domain. And a high probability of egalitarian/non-essentialist responses on the indicators ‘care work’ and ‘young children’ reveals the belief that women and men are equally suited and responsible for housework and the care of (young) children, i.e. an innate gender difference is rejected. In labeling the gender ideologies, I have been guided by class members’ response patterns, but for comparability with other studies I tried to choose labels that have previously been used: egalitarians, egalitarian essentialists, intensive parenting endorsers, traditionals. The fact that in addition to the two consistent gender ideologies at the edges of the gender ideology spectrum, i.e. egalitarian/non-essentialist and traditional/essentialist ideologies, others are identified, confirms the multidimensionality of gender ideology and thus also hypothesis 1.

In the following, the gender ideologies are described in descending order of prevalence. Their spread in the two regions and their content will be presented. For each gender ideology, I will also specify which socio-demographic predictors, focusing on gender, contribute to the chances that someone will hold a given ideology (the results of the corresponding multinomial logistic regression can be found in Table 1).

The most widespread gender ideology in both East and West Germany is labeled egalitarians because those respondents hold egalitarian or non-essentialist beliefs toward all indicators (as can be seen in Figures 1A and 1B, the probability for giving egalitarian responses is above 80 % for almost all indicators). Thus, this ideology is consistent, or one-dimensional egalitarian, irrespective of whether the indicator addresses the public or private domain. Accordingly, individuals holding this ideology do not expect any negative consequences from maternal employment for children, support gender equality in access to politics, university, or employment, and reject an innate greater ability of women for care work. In East Germany, three quarters of the respondents can be assigned to this class, in West Germany half of the sample, which indicates a higher prevalence of the egalitarian gender ideology in East Germany, confirming Hypothesis 2a.

The second largest latent class or gender ideology in both regions is the heterogeneous egalitarian essentialism. It covers a fifth of the people living in West Germany and a quarter of those living in East Germany (see Figures 1A and 1B). These respondents believe that women should focus on family rather than on career, that it is more important for women than for men to look after the home and children, as well as that women are the better caregivers for young children (because these respondents have low probabilities for giving non-essentialist responses to the indicators ‘focus on family’, ‘care work’ and ‘young children’). Thus, egalitarian essentialists expect women to be naturally better suited for care work than men, and therefore believe in an innate difference between the genders. At the same time, egalitarian essentialists are likely to endorse gender-equal access to politics, university and employment. Egalitarian essentialists in West Germany have a high probability to not expect negative consequences for children from maternal employment, while those in East Germany are ambivalent in this regard. Since egalitarian essentialists, who combine beliefs about shared responsibilities and equal opportunities in the public domain with essentialist beliefs about the private domain are identified in West and East Germany, hypothesis 2b is confirmed, which expected to find this gender ideology in both regions. There are relevant predictors for being assigned to this class. In both regions, respondents with a low or medium level of education and males (in West Germany additionally parents) have higher chances to be egalitarian-essentialists than egalitarians compared to highly educated respondents or women (or those without children).

Figure 1A:

Conditional Probability for Giving Egalitarian Responses by Classes, West

Note: FReDA W1, weighted data. N West=15 765; N East=2 765.

Within the sample of people living in West Germany but not in East Germany, two additional gender ideologies can be identified. The class labeled intensive parenting endorsers contains 17.2 % of the West German sample. Intensive parenting endorsers are likely to expect negative consequences of maternal employment for young children (they are ambivalent concerning the worsening of the mother-child-relationship due to employment), and they strongly support mothers focusing on children and family rather than on their careers. At the same time, they think that it is important for both parents to engage in housework and childcare, and that parents of both genders are equally suited for the care of young children – something that distinguishes them from the egalitarian essentialists. In this, the child-centeredness of this class becomes very clear. Additionally, intensive parenting endorsers have a high likelihood for egalitarian beliefs concerning the public domain. Older respondents, those with low or medium levels of education, and males have higher chances of endorsing intensive parenting than of supporting consistent egalitarianism.

Figure 1B:

Conditional Probability for Giving Egalitarian Responses by Classes, East

Reading example: The conditional probability of giving an egalitarian response to the indicator ‘child suffers’ – i.e. not believing that a pre-school child is likely to suffer if his/her mother works – is 87 % for egalitarians and 50 % for egalitarian essentialists.

Additionally, the class of traditionals can be identified in the West German sample only, which has low probabilities for egalitarian responses on six of the eight indicators. This is the smallest class, however, comprising 10.5 % of the respondents living in West Germany. Traditionals endorse women focusing on family, and believe them to be better suited for care work and childcare. The members of this class also believe that children and the mother-child-relationship will suffer from maternal employment, and consequently, that a job is less important for women than for men. Only in terms of political competence and access to university education do they believe in male and female equality. Respondents who have a partner but are not married (compared to those without a partner) and women have lower chances to be traditional than egalitarian, while respondents with medium or low levels of education have higher chances to hold a traditional gender ideology.

Summarizing the gender differences, it can be noted that women have significantly lower chances than men of being assigned to a non-egalitarian class, and that this gender difference is of comparable significance and magnitude in East and West Germany. The gender difference continues to hold true when other socio-demographic characteristics are considered. In other words, women in both regions are more likely to hold an egalitarian gender ideology than men, which is in line with the expectation of hypothesis 3.

To test the robustness of the reported results, all analyses were additionally conducted with an East-West pooled sample and separately for women and men. They confirm the prevalence and interpretation of the four gender ideologies. Moreover, the regressions with the pooled sample validate the East-West differences in gender ideology as East Germans’ chances of being assigned to a non-egalitarian class are significantly lower (see Appendix Table A3). Gender and level of education are confirmed as important predictors for gender ideology. In addition, in the gender-separated analyses (see Appendix Tables A4 and A5), the aforementioned gender differences are confirmed as the egalitarian gender ideology is more widespread in the female sample, while the less egalitarian ideologies are more prevalent in the male sample. Also, in these regressions level of education is the most powerful predictor and region of Germany remains a significant predictor overall (there were single significant coefficients for other predictors).

6 Discussion and Conclusion

This paper examined gender ideologies in East and West Germany using data from the representative FReDA survey (Schneider et al. 2021; Bujard et al. 2023b) conducted in 2021. The multidimensional conception of gender ideology applied in this study, and its examination using LCA ties in with recent findings of (inter-)national research on the existence of various belief patterns regarding gender roles (Scarborough et al. 2019; Sievers & Warner 2022; Begall et al. 2023). The analysis of current data from Germany expands on prior findings by contributing to the identification of potential adaptations in gender ideology in the context of the transformation of family policy since the early 2000s. Furthermore, this study represents an initial attempt to describe multidimensional gender ideologies in the aftermath of families’ experiences during the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Additionally, it extends the research on multidimensional gender ideologies differentiating between East and West Germany (Barth & Trübner 2018; Sievers & Warner 2022) by not only providing contemporary insights into enduring disparities, but also by shedding light on gender differences and socio-demographic characteristics associated with the ideologies within the regions.

Three main findings emerged from the analyses. First, the majority of the 18- to 49-year-old respondents (three quarters of respondents in East-, and more than half of the sample in West Germany) had a consistent egalitarian gender ideology, though in both regions the heterogeneous egalitarian-essentialist ideology was the second most common in 2021. Egalitarians were very likely to reject innate gender differences and to support gender equality in both the public and private domains. However, this very widespread support for gender equality contrasts with often observable gender role behaviors of women and men, such as the gendered division of labor in the private domain, that previous research has found to be predominant among parenting couples in Germany (OECD 2017). Closer to these behaviors is the gender ideology of egalitarian essentialists, who supported gender equality in the public domain, but at the same time held essentialist beliefs regarding the private domain as they saw women as better suited for childcare and housework, although for them this did not conflict with mothers working. Thus, they assumed an inherent gender difference relevant for care work. This multidimensional ideology was not identified in comparable studies using 2012 data (Barth & Trübner 2018; Sievers & Warner 2022). In those studies, the only heterogeneous ideology was intensive mothering. The main difference between this and the egalitarian-essentialist ideology is that the latter does not view the employment of mothers as negative for children. Obviously, the findings do not imply causality, but the existence of the egalitarian-essentialist ideology in 2021 may reflect the now effective norm-setting (Gangl & Ziefle 2015) of the changed family policy, which promotes maternal employment, but continues to incentivize the gender-specific division of care work. In East Germany, it may also be the normative legacy of the gender role socialization experiences associated with the former GDR regime, which implemented many measures to reconcile paid and unpaid work for mothers, but not for fathers (Trappe 1996). Moreover, the experiences during the closures of school and childcare institutions at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in Germany might be associated with egalitarian-essentialism. This situation in which mothers carried out the lion’s share of the childcare, but also saw that share grow during the closures (Hipp & Bünning 2021) might have contributed to the essentialist belief that they are better suited to this type of domestic work than fathers. However, it has to be noted that the return to gender traditionalism in response to the burden of working while caring for children at home that was feared at the beginning of the pandemic, has apparently not occurred – as earlier findings on fathers’ restored support for maternal employment already suggested (Huebener et al. 2022) – since still in 2021, the majority of respondents were egalitarians.

Second, the results showed strong differences in gender ideologies between East and West Germany – even after thirty years under the same political framework, and in a sample that was born or came of age after reunification in 1990. The egalitarian gender ideology was considerably more prevalent in East Germany, which suggests lasting effects of regime socialization, and in West Germany there was greater heterogeneity in gender ideology. Here, the traditional gender ideology and the belief pattern of intensive parenting were additionally found. The traditionals were characterized by a strong emphasis on gendered spheres and innate gender-specific abilities. Although it was the least prevalent gender ideology, accounting for only about one-tenth of the sample, its prevalence was comparable to that of a decade ago (Barth & Trübner 2018; Sievers & Warner 2022). The persistence of this belief pattern might also be due to former regime socialization or institutional learning (Rohrschneider 1996) in combination with the intergenerational transmission of gender ideology (Bussey & Bandura 1999). It suggests that the historic gender regime in West Germany, which for decades emphasized the domestic role of women, is still important for today’s gender ideologies. The data used in this study presents an opportunity to delve more deeply into the potentially enduring effects of disparate regime socialization in West and East. A comparative analysis of the gender ideologies of cohorts who underwent their primary socialization before and after reunification represents a promising avenue for future research. The intensive parenting endorsers identified in West Germany focused on the well-being of the child. On this basis, they expected children to suffer if their mothers were employed, while at the same time supported fathers’ involvement in childcare. The fact that this belief pattern was only found in the West may indicate that the care of young children was historically understood to best take place within the family, while in the East extra-familial childcare was and is common (Rosenfeld et al. 2004). Even today, there is still less institutional care available for young children in the West, and consequently a higher level of care within families than in the East (BMFSFJ 2023). However, egalitarian developments like increasing maternal employment rates and family policy measures to promote the childcare involvement of fathers may have led to the belief that the lack of institutional care no longer needs to be compensated for by mothers alone, but that fathers should and can also take on this task. As men were more likely than women to support the ideology of intensive parenting, this could in fact be an expression of their desire to be more involved in childcare.

Third, the analyses revealed that women had significantly higher chances than men to hold a consistent egalitarian gender ideology, confirming the findings on gender differences from a decade ago (Grunow et al. 2018; Begall et al. 2023; Knight & Brinton 2017), and the gender difference was observed to be consistent across both East and West Germany. The robustness of gender to the inclusion of other predictors for gender ideology strengthens interest-based explanations (Bolzendahl & Myers 2004), which assume that women are more egalitarian because they would benefit from greater gender equality. In addition to gender, educational attainment also emerged as a robust predictor in both regions. This corroborates the exposure-based explanation (Bolzendahl & Myers 2004), which assumes that greater education increases the likelihood of encountering egalitarian ideas and developing a greater ability to challenge gender stereotypes. As a result, in both regions of the country, the egalitarian ideology was more likely to be supported by women and highly educated people, while men and people with low and medium levels of education had higher chances to be egalitarian-essentialists.

There are a number of limitations of this research which should be borne in mind. First, the distribution of responses to some indicators was rather skewed as most respondents gave egalitarian answers. One potential explanation for this is that the survey only inquired about the familial consequences of maternal employment in general, rather than considering the extent of employment depending on the age of the children or the impact of paternal employment. It would be advantageous to develop new indicators that address these aspects (see Walter 2018), which could potentially reveal less egalitarian belief patterns. Second, the coding of the indicators, especially the coding of reverse traditionalism as ‘egalitarian’, must also be considered when interpreting the results. Third, the labeling of the classes already required some interpretation, so this might have been done differently by other researchers. Nevertheless, the study refrained from inventing new labels, instead referring to those used in previous studies for greater comparability. Fourth, due to the novelty of the FReDA survey, the study could only look at the year 2021, and therefore could not make statements on trends in gender ideology. However, the following waves of the FReDA panel study in the next years will make it possible to examine the stability of gender ideologies in East and West Germany over time, whereby the information gathered in this study can serve as a 2021 baseline. Fifth, the FReDA sample included 18–49-year-olds, but a sample comprising older people might reveal different gender ideologies. However, age was not a significant predictor in most analyses.

From a societal and political perspective, the study’s findings on the prevalence of heterogeneous belief patterns and East-West differences are relevant as they suggest that both ‘legacy’ and ‘policy’ (see Rosenfeld et al. 2004) matter for current gender ideologies. There are ideologies which are still congruent with the historical gender regimes in East and West Germany, but pro-equality policies have the potential, through regime socialization and norm-setting, to further advance the egalitarian trend in gender ideologies and thereby establish new legacies. And since the majority of respondents in 2021 supported gender equality in both the public and private domain and since beliefs are a driver for behavioral decisions, more equality-oriented institutional and labor market conditions could also contribute to reduce gendered labor divisions within families. Moreover, the study made clear that higher levels of education and thus higher awareness of gender-specific stereotypes, as well as knowledge about, and the experience of the potential consequences of gender inequality contribute to strengthening egalitarianism, which is why educational institutions have a particular responsibility for raising awareness here. Finally, the finding that in both regions a substantial proportion of the respondents held heterogeneous gender ideologies that cannot be traced along a continuum between traditional and egalitarian confirms both the multidimensional conception of gender ideology, and the findings of previous international studies, which have shown that the revolution in gender ideology has not stalled, but that there is a greater diversification of belief patterns.