Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change Around the World.

By Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 240p. $60.00 cloth, $21.00 paper.

In this work, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris argue that an important aspect of modernization has been empirically observable cultural change that has brought support for liberal gender equality. Such change, in turn, has had demonstrably positive but uneven impacts upon women's political participation.

Rising Tide is part of a larger research program that, while retaining many of the basic assumptions of classical modernization theory, seeks to recast the theory in several respects: redefining the unifying feature of modernizing social change as a broadening of human choice; emphasizing the growth of individualistic, self expressive modern values; providing extensive empirical evidence of cultural change; and distinguishing two discrete phases of modernization, agrarian to industrial and industrial to postindustrial transitions, each with distinctive values developments. To document cultural change, the book draws also upon the World Values Survey, a large-scale survey project of the values and beliefs of publics in more than 65 countries, conducted in three waves, from 1990–91, 1995–96, and 1999–2001. The survey included five questions that the authors briefly, but not entirely convincingly, assert capture key gender attitudes, which they categorize dualistically as modern liberal equality norms or deviations from such norms. In addition, the book draws on decades of research on women's political participation in liberal democracies. For those who share the authors' theoretical and methodological approach, the findings will be useful, but other readers may find parts of the book provocative and not altogether satisfying.

In the first half, Norris and Inglehart argue that modernization, a coherent process of economic, cultural, and political change, includes a probabilistic process of cultural change toward liberal gender equality norms—ideas that men and women are similar in political, work, educational, and family roles. Social modernization unfolds in two distinct stages: The first stage of industrialization draws women into public life, though in subordinate positions, while the postindustrial phase tends to create gender equality in the worlds of family, work, and politics. The authors try to show the generally culturally egalitarian force of modernization by correlating rankings of countries by GDP/capita (and Human Development Index rank) and findings on the Gender Equality Scale that draw on questions in the World Values Survey; by showing that within countries, birth cohorts score significantly differently, depending upon the degree of modernization prevailing in the society as a whole during childhood and adolescence; and by arguing that individual cultural values scores are related to the individual's modernization as indicated by age, education, and religion (but also markedly to their gender). Though there are significant anomalies, the authors adduce considerable evidence for their thesis.

In the second half of the book, Norris and Inglehart explore more middle-range hypotheses regarding the specific political consequences of the “rising tide” of modernization and norms of gender equality, especially within societies making transitions to postindustrialism. In most cases they affirm that in postindustrial society, the movement is away from inequality, but they note that political behavior has not changed as quickly as cultural change might suggest it would. They acknowledge that legacies of the communist experience are significant, yet they argue that political institutions only determine the pace, not the ultimate direction, of change. The authors explore many varieties of women's political participation in relation to men's: ideological values and left–right voting behavior; political activism in “traditional” forms of voting, party membership, union membership, levels of political interest, and frequency of political discussion; women's civic activism; women's protest activism; and women's officeholding in liberal democratic institutions.

The book's key assertion that modernization itself, a slow-moving, even “glacial” trend, is responsible for attitudes and outcomes of gender equality raises some questions. It cannot capture the problems and puzzles of shorter-term development or the proximate causes of gender norms and gendered social and political outcomes. In fact, the overall argument seems a fairly deterministic one, since the book's narration is focused on long-term, generally unidirectional trends, and political mobilizations make no appearance. In their conclusion, the authors deny they are making a deterministic argument; they affirm the importance of institutional and policy reform but caution that in the absence of cultural support for equality, gender equality policies risk being subject to backlash.

The authors also report substantial discrepancies in outcomes among countries that, according to economic or other modernization indices, should converge and some surprising convergences among countries that should be divergent. For example, they note the religiosity of the United States despite modernization theory's assertion of secularization over time, variations among countries in egalitarian values at similar developmental levels, the appearance of decisive “modern” gender gaps in poor countries, and the decrease in women's political participation in the postcommunist transitions. These anomalies are bracketed, rather than seriously explored.

While the book does discuss women's (and men's) cultural attitudes in relation to individual level variables that are modernization related, it does not engage with class as a social process and a set of structures produced through global capitalism often with negative consequences for women in particular locations. The authors' approach cannot address, for example, the ways in which colonial and capitalist “modernization” introduced the domestication of traditionally highly mobile, productive women in agrarian societies; the complex positions and loss of power of women in manufacturing sectors in the maquiladoras or in the South Korean economic “miracle”; or the fact that in the United States and other postindustrial societies, the liberal equality of some women appears increasingly to be accompanied by the marginalization of others, many of whom are global migrant care workers. The reader may wonder whether norms of liberal gender equality speak equally to the lives of poor and better-off women: Does the American low-income single mother benefit from being treated as a male breadwinner? Are liberal equality and Western modernization the aspiration of women around the world and the only route to women's development and empowerment, as the argument suggests?

Written in the tradition of empirical modernization literature, Rising Tide tries to distill very general measurable trends; inevitably flattens much human experience into commensurable data; fails to address complex issues of the social and political meaning of data in different contexts; and cannot specify complex power-laden mechanisms of social and political processes. Nevertheless, it offers many important and intriguing arguments, advancing the empirical literature on value change and women's participation in postindustrial democracies and engaging with the important question of women's empowerment across the globe.