Tackling Traditional: Tamil Gender Ideologies and their Socioeconomic Correlates

Modernization theory posited gender ideology as a unidimensional continuum from “traditional” to egalitarian, with societies becoming more egalitarian as they progress. Recent research replaces this unidimensional view with multidimensionality, but other remnants of modernization theory remain. We tackle such remnants by examining gender ideologies and their socioeconomic correlates in Tamil Nadu, an Indian state often labeled “traditional.” Using latent class analysis of 10 gender attitudes from the South Indian Community Health Study, we identify six gender ideologies. Two are consistently egalitarian or essentialist, two are mixed, and two are characterized by ambivalent agreement. Attitudes toward mobility are a crucial divider; moderate support for equal mobility distinguishes “consistent egalitarians” from “seclusionist egalitarians” and “agreeable seclusionists” from the “highly agreeable.” These agreeable ideologies likely reflect acquiescence bias, but may also signal polite resistance to feminist scripts. The gender ideologies are correlated with gender, religion, and education, but have little to no association with caste, age, and class. These findings extend the multidimensionality of gender ideology to an Indian context and hint at the power of global and local cultural scripts. More broadly, they demonstrate the value—and challenges—of building a more global understanding of gender ideology freer of the remnants of modernization theory.