Gradational gender identification, work and care practices and mental wellbeing across European gender regimes

01/11/2026 to 30/10/2029

Despite active gender equality policies in many countries, gender remains a defining feature of societies and individual lives across rich countries with persistent differences between men and women inter alias in time allocations, economic and mental wellbeing. To-date, most research has focused on investigating differences between men and women. However, binary measures of individuals’ sex or self-reported gender category underestimate the amount of variation in gender identities and are at odds with more nuanced, multidimensional concepts of gender in contemporary sociology and psychology. This project argues that at the individual level gradational measures of perceived gender conformity are important to fill a gap in measuring gender identity and to complement domain-specific measures of gender-related beliefs. Building on a small number of studies based on non-representative, this project extends the self-categorization approach using gradational self-ratings of femininity and masculinity by explore the potentials and pitfalls of such novel measures using several representative cross-sectional data from about 30 European countries, longitudinal panel data from the UK and Germany including also a priming experiment and open-ended questions.