The long shadow of private life: Hidden barriers to gender equality

Why does gender inequality persist even though formal barriers, such as unequal access to education and the labor market, have largely disappeared? This project examines how social expectations and interactional dynamics in private contexts sustain inequality beyond formal institutional constraints. Building on the notion of a “stalled and uneven gender revolution” (England 2010), the “Hidden Barriers” project investigates how persistent gender norms, stereotypes, and interactional dynamics in private life contribute to durable labor market inequalities.

Focusing on families, relationships, and everyday interactions, the project examines how expectations about women’s roles in care and family life produce biased evaluations, constrained choices, and unequal allocations of opportunities. In particular, it identifies mechanisms such as anticipatory self-selection, normative sanctioning, and role-based evaluation biases that are consequential for labor market outcomes. Adopting an intersectional perspective, the project examines how these processes vary systematically by social class, parenthood status, and migration background, highlighting that gendered expectations are neither uniform nor equally consequential across groups.

Methodologically, the project combines experimental designs to identify causal effects of gendered expectations, survey data to assess their prevalence, and qualitative evidence to uncover how they are enacted and negotiated in everyday life. This multi-method approach allows the project to link micro-level interactions to broader patterns of inequality.

Initial findings indicate that expectations about women’s and men’s family roles and seemingly private behaviors systematically shape evaluations in professional contexts and lead to differential rewards and penalties for women and men, making progress toward gender equality uneven and fragile.