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Socialized Choices - Labour Market Behaviour of Dutch Mothers 
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reversed recoded and after computing the scale, the whole scale is reversed and rescaled, running 
from 0 (traditional) to 1 (egalitarian). Cronbach’s Alpha = 0.781. 
The second independent variable is a mother’s personal gender attitude. This 
variable is based on one question, as suggested by Hakim (2000): ‘Which family 
life is closest to your ideal family life?’. The possible answers are shown in table 
5. This variable is recoded into three categories, viz. a traditional ideal family life 
(answering option 1), an adaptive ideal family life (answering option 2) and an 
egalitarian ideal family life (answering categories 3 to 6). According to this 
question, only one in eight mothers has a traditional personal gender attitude, a 
little more than one third have adaptive personal gender attitudes and a little more 
than half of the mothers have egalitarian gender attitudes (table 5). 
Table 5. Which family life is closest to your ideal family life? 
 
% 
agree 
1. 
A family in which my partner works fulltime and I take care of the household tasks and 
child care 
12 
2. 
A family in which my partner works fulltime and I work part-time and take the main 
responsibility of the household tasks and child care 
36 
3. 
A family in which both parents share equally paid labour, household tasks and child 
care 
49 
4. 
A family in which I work fulltime and my partner works part-time and he (or she) takes 
the main responsibility of the household tasks and child care 
.7 
5. 
A family in which I work fulltime and my partner takes care of the household tasks and 
child care. 
.2 
6. 
A single parent family in which I work and take care of the household tasks and child 
care 
2.9 
7. 
No children 
.4 
N = 930 
Source: ‘Women and their social environment’, Liss Panel, Centerdata, University of Tilburg, 
November 2010. 
The third attitudinal variable refers to the respondents’ personal work-life 
attitude. This attitude is measured by asking each respondent to choose out of 
eleven propositions about work and life, (e.g. ‘I work in order to earn money’ and 
‘I work to contribute to society’), the three answers that suited her most. The 
propositions also include life attitudes, like ‘a good education is important’, 
‘caring for others is important’ and ‘I only want to do want I really want’. The 
first reason for this is that mothers who are not employed are also included in the 
sample, and inviting them to consider only work attitudes would be awkward and 
would make it difficult for them to choose their current attitudes. The second 
reason is that I expect if mothers are also invited to consider other important life 
values, the relative importance of specific work attitudes will be measured more 
accurately. The respondents could pick a maximum of three answers. In this way 
of questioning, it is assumed that only strong personal attitudes are chosen. Ajzen 
and Fishbein (2005) argue that the strength of an attitude is related to the strength 

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Chapter 4 - The vital and stabilising role of work preferences 
117 
of the association, the stronger the attitude, the more automatically and frequently 
accessible the association is from memory.   
The consequence of this way of questioning is that the different propositions 
could not be transformed straightforwardly into a single variable. The Cronbach’s 
Alpha of a set of attitudes selected by a factor analysis was too small to reduce 
the number of variables by constructing a scale variable. Therefore, I include each 
attitude that was mentioned as a separate dichotomous variable in the analysis 
(see table 2 for the full list).  
Independent variables: socialization factors 
In line with socialization theory and exposure-based theories, the respondents 
were asked questions about several parental background characteristics that might 
have influenced their current preferred number of work hours. These include the 
educational level of the respondent’s parents, measured in five categories, and the 
fact as to whether the respondent’s mother used to be in paid work when the 
respondent was aged 12. It is also expected in this study that the more egalitarian 
the division of labour between the respondent’s parents was, the more egalitarian 
her own (general and personal) gender attitude is (Putten, 2009, Schroeder, Blood 
and Maluso, 1997). Since a single mother can, by definition, not have an unequal 
division of roles with her spouse, it is assumed that being raised by a single parent 
also renders more egalitarian gender attitudes. Therefore, the actual division of 
labour between the parents at the time the respondent was 12 years old, was 
asked. The respondents could choose between a traditional breadwinner 
household (father worked, mother stayed at home), a modified breadwinner-
household (father worked full-time, mother worked part-time), an egalitarian 
household (both parents worked and shares unpaid tasks equally), and a single 
parent family. The results in table 6 indicate that the vast majority (61.8 per cent) 
of Dutch mothers were raised in traditional households, 10.3 per cent had an 
egalitarian parental background, and 4.6 per cent of the mothers were raised in a 
single parent family. 
Table 6. Parental division of labour at twelve years old 
 n 
% 
agree 
1. 
Traditional division of labour 
577 
61.3 
2. 
One-and-a-half breadwinner model 
217 
23.1 
3. 
Egalitarian division of labour 
29 
10.1 
4. 
Single parent family 
43 
4.6 
5. 
Total 934 
99.3 
Source: ‘Women and their social environment’, Liss Panel, Centerdata, University of Tilburg, 
November 2010. 

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