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. 

First, this project aims to explore how socialization factors including biological sex, parental education and employment and contextual variation of regional and national gender regimes relate to individuals’ gradational gender identification across about 30 European countries based on data from the European Social Survey 2023. Second, we investigate how daily practices, bodily and personality experiences correlate with gender identification across Europe as well as in representative panel studies in Germany and the UK to advance our understanding of what contents respondents consider in their self-ratings femininity and masculinity. To further explore the content validity, we also examine how self-ratings correspond with free text associations in the German GESIS Panel.pop Population Sample and how this varies across intersectional gender, age and socio-economic groups in East and West Germany with different gender cultures. Third, a priming experiment in the German GESIS Panel.pop examines whether emphasizing contextual variation in sex and gender categorizations can reduce sorting into polarized gender identification categories. To further advance our understanding of how gradational measures of gender identification can used to measures deviations from norms of femininity and masculinity which may be directly linked to lower mental health and wellbeing and to complement domain-specific gender beliefs, the fourth part of the project investigates associations with changing paid and unpaid work and subjective wellbeing across the transition to parenthood using data from representative panel studies in the UK and Germany in addition to a cross-sectional comparison across European gender regimes.