Gender role attitudes: Native Americans in comparative perspective

Abstract

Native Americans have often been idealized as more egalitarian than other race and ethnic groups today, particularly with respect to the roles of women. Using data from the General Social Surveys 1972-1996, we test the hypothesis that Native Americans will be more egalitarian than other ethnic/racial groups on attitudinal measures of gender equality
due to their cultural history of egalitarianism. Native Americans are not statistically significantly more egalitarian than whites when other variables are controlled, but Hispanics and Blacks have significantly lower scores. Interesting differences emerge from separate analyses of Native Americans and the other race and ethnic groups. For example,
family income is less important for the Native Americans, while the role of keeping house appears to be more important. Age was less important for Hispanics. However, the structure of the regression equations is similar for all of the groups, with education, age, year of survey, religious intensity and sex emerging as the most important variables. Even though the Native Americans are the most egalitarian, they are influenced by these structural variables in much the same manner as the other groups.