Class Year

2026

Document Type

Student Research Paper

Date of Creation

Spring 2026

Department 1

Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Abstract

From "The Second Shift" to Claudia Goldin’s Nobel Prize-winning research on women in the labor market, the inequities affecting women in the labor market have been widely documented. However, progress on this issue has been largely one-sided on behalf of women, perpetuating gender inequality. The goal of my research is to understand how social subgroup values influence male-identifying Gettysburg College students’ predictions on how they will engage with parental leave. This project gathered information on ways to increase male uptake of parental leave, which, if implemented, will help improve gender equity in the labor market.

How are male-identifying Gettysburg College students’ perspectives on parental leave impacted by the values of their social subgroups? I combined a demographics survey with a stratified sample of focus groups to answer this question, expecting that participants from socially dominant subgroups (fraternities and athletic teams) would have more traditional views on parental leave than those from non-dominant subgroups (club sports, political clubs, cultural clubs, and service organizations). Through the lens of feminist standpoint epistemology, male privilege creates less complete perceptions of parental leave compared to perspectives of women, and intersectional variations between men will demonstrate policy paths to increasing leave uptake.

Prominent themes contributed to three main findings. First, participants strongly supported parental leave, but they approached it as an individual choice, rather than a structural issue. Second, young men’s attitudes towards masculinity are shifting on a surface level, but they are still grounded in patriarchal structures, namely through benevolent patriarchy. Finally, differences in perspective among the stratified social subgroups were negligible due to the ubiquity of hegemonic masculinity, inviting an examination of demographic trends. Following these perspectives, policy recommendations include universal, federally mandated paid leave for 20 weeks, with a quota system.

Comments

Written for WGS 400: Senior Seminar

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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