ORIGINAL ARTICLE Biological Essentialism, Gender Ideologies, and Role Attitudes: What Determines Parents’ Involvement in Child Care Ruth Gaunt Published online: 28 November 2006 # Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2006 Abstract This study draws on Bem’ s conceptualization (The lenses of gender: Transforming the debate on sexual inequality . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993) of biological essentialism to explore fathers’ and mothers’ involvement in child care. The relationships between parental essentialist perceptions, gender ideology, fathers’ role attitudes, and various forms of involvement in child care were examined. Two hundred and nine couples with 6–36-month-old children completed extensive question- naires. Analyses revealed that fathers’ essentialist percep- tions predicted involvement in child care tasks and hours of care by the mother, whereas mothers’ essentialist percep- tions predicted hours of care by the father. Parents’ attitudes toward the father ’ s role predicted involvement in child care tasks. Parents’ attitudes and perceptions contributed to involvement in child care even after the effects of the parents’ employment were controlled. The importance of examining various aspects of parents’ views, and distin- guishing different forms of involvement in child care is discussed. Keywords Child care . Essentialism . Father involvement . Gender ideology Over the last 30 years, an increasing proportion of women has entered the labor force. Attitudes toward the appropriate roles of men and women in the workplace have changed accordingly (Coltrane, 2000; Thompson & Walker, 1989). Nevertheless, the change in attitudes toward the appropriate roles of men and women in the family has been smaller, and the change in allocation of housework and child care re- sponsibilities smaller still (Aldous, Mulligan, & Bjarnason, 1998; Coltrane, 2000; Thompson & Walker, 1989). Al- though some studies have shown that the gender gap in allocation of housework and child care tasks is decreasing (e.g., Pleck & Masciadrelli, 2003, research still shows a discrepancy in the performance of these tasks, even when both spouses are employed full-time (e.g., Biernat & Wortman, 1991; Pleck, 1997). The present study was devoted to exploring fathers’ and mothers’ involvement in child care within the framework of Bem’ s(1993) analysis of biological essentialism as a gender lens. Bem argued that biological essentialism rationalizes gender polarization and male dominance by treating them as the natural consequences of the inherent biological sex differences. Bem’ s(1993) conceptualization of biological essentialism, combined with Medin’ s(1989) work on psychological essentialism, suggests that parents’ tendency to perceive men and women as essentially different in their predispositions to parenthood may account for their choices regarding the allocation of responsibilities and performance of child care. It is further argued that each spouse’ s essentialist perceptions may influence that spouse’ s own levels of involvement as well as the involvement of the other spouse. In addition to essentialist perceptions, this study also was designed to examine two related types of attitudes, namely, parents’ gender ideologies and their attitudes toward the father ’ s role. Previous attempts to explore the influence of gender ideologies on the allocation of child care responsi- bilities have yielded conflicting results (for a review see Pleck, 1997). The premise here is that gender ideologies are relatively abstract views that may not necessarily be related to parents’ day-to-day behavior. An examination of the role of parents’ specific attitudes regarding the father ’ s child Sex Roles (2006) 55:523–533 DOI 10.1007/s11199-006-9105-0 R. Gaunt (*) Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bar-Ilan University, 52900 Ramat-Gan, Israel e-mail: gauntr@mail.biu.ac.il