Gender Equality and Gender Attitudes in African Countries

This research looks at attitudes people have regarding women’s roles and their labor market involvement. The hypothesis tested stem from Modernization as a mechanism of gender attitude change. Scholars of this theory suggest that structural and value changes produce a liberal gender attitude. A secondary data for Ghana and South Africa was used to test the hypothesis. The data was from the world value survey wave 6. The research thus created a gender attitude index and found that South Africa was more liberal than Ghana when it comes to attitudes towards the role of women and their involvement in the labor market. The research further to determine the impact of certain socio-economic factors. The results showed that women in both countries have liberal attitudes but the impact is positive in Ghana and negative in South Africa. Middle age people in South Africa have a positive impact on attitudes but not in Ghana. The research also found that higher education in Ghana leads to more liberal gender attitudes but the effect is not the same South Africa. Also, religious people have more egalitarian gender attitudes in Ghana and more traditional gender attitudes in South Africa. The effect of some factors is the same as in most countries, and the effect of the other countries is the opposite. The results show that the mechanism through which modernization leads to change in gender attitudes from traditional to egalitarianism do not work well in African countries. However, there is a chance that with several countries on the road to modernizing through improvement in several factors, gender attitudes will become more liberal than it is today.