New publication: „From attitudes to social networks: National gender-role attitudes and gender differences in late-life social relationships“

The new publication by Ella Cohn-Schwartz and Alina Schmitz examines the extent to which gender differences in social networks in old age depend on overall social gender role attitudes. To this end, data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) were linked with data on gender role attitudes from the European Values Survey (EVS) for 15 European countries.

Results show that women have larger social networks and a higher proportion of children and girlfriends in their networks compared with men. In particular, in countries with more egalitarian gender roles, women have a higher proportion of female friends. In contrast, in countries with traditional gender roles, children and spouses dominated older women's networks. The results suggest that societal conditions help determine the structure of social relationships in old age.

For more information and the full text, click here.