The Y Generation Myth: young Israelis’ perceptions of gender and family life

ABSTRACT

Our study seeks to compare attitudes towards family life and gender roles between Generation X and Generation Y, focusing on the ages of 18-29, a period regarded as that of emerging adulthood. Most of the academic scholarship on this issue focuses on Western and Anglo-American individuals, their values and perceptions. By contrast, our article explores questions of gender roles and family life among Generations X and Y in the Middle Eastern country of Israel, utilizing the perspectives of the Second Demographic Transition and the Stalled Gender Revolution. Using the 1994, 2002, and 2012 waves of the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) module on Family and Gender Roles, our findings indicate that Israeli Gen Y young adults tend to report more conservative perceptions regarding family and gender roles than their Gen X counterparts. This is generally explained by a higher level of religiosity among Israeli young adults from Gen Y.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender roles
• emerging adulthood
• Generation Y
• Generation X
• family

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Arnett (2015) explains that this life stage spans ages 18–29 but regards the core group as those aged 18–25.

2 The Israeli economy suffers from the global Covid-19 pandemic as much as other capitalist countries. However, this study was conducted before the pandemic.

3 The statistics about Israel were taken from the ICBS (Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics) (2020). More can be found at: www.cbs.gov.il.

4 The fact that married women are exempt from army service exemplifies the patriarchal and pronatalist nature of the Israeli army and Israeli society, where women are first and foremost regarded as mothers (Berkovitch 1997).

5 http://www.issp.org.

6 According to the ISSP Survey, samples are random and representative of the adult (18+) population in Israel. Therefore, no weight is needed.

7 We also ran all models using pairwise deletion as well as mean substitution. Findings were exactly the same across all methods of dealing with missing values.

8 All findings were robust when analyzing only the Israeli-Jewish sample.

Additional information

Funding

The research was funded by a grant from the The Gandyr Foundation.