Does Her Education Determine His Mind? Spousal Education and Gender Role Attitudes Across Macro-Contexts

Research on educational spillover effects within couples has documented a gendered asymmetry in which wives’ education shapes husbands’ gender attitudes more than the reverse. But this literature has been largely confined to a single region, leaving unclear whether these dynamics generalize across societies. Using data from 56 countries in the seventh wave of the World Values Survey, this study employed multilevel dominance analysis and multilevel linear models to examine cross-national variation in spousal educational influences on gender role attitudes. Results confirmed a striking gender asymmetry. Wives’ education was the most important predictor of husbands’ attitudes, whereas wives’ own education mattered most for themselves. However, this asymmetry varied across macro-contexts. The effect of wives’ education on husbands’ attitudes was stronger in societies with greater women’s labor market access, while the effect of husbands' education on wives’ attitudes was stronger in less secular cultural climates. In societies where women lacked structural bargaining power, the pattern reversed, with husbands’ attitudes primarily shaped by their own education rather than their wives’. Based on these findings, this study proposes a context-bargaining framework, arguing that intra-household gender dynamics depend on macro-level conditions that either enable or constrain women’s voice and agency. These findings highlight that investing in women’s education alone is insufficient for empowering women’s voice without structural opportunities for women's social participation and a secular cultural climate that legitimizes equal spousal communication.