Warning: Hegemonic Masculinity May Not Matter as Much as You Think for Confidant Patterns among Older Men
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Warning: Hegemonic Masculinity May Not Matter as Much as You Think for Confidant Patterns among Older Men Celeste Campos-Castillo 1
&
stef m. shuster 2
&
Sarah M. Groh 3 & Denise L. Anthony 4
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Previous scholarship shows that cisgender women are more likely to have confidants than cisgender men and that the latter are more likely to have confidants outside the family and keep spheres (e.g., friends versus family) separate. Growing evidence shows these confidant patterns shift in older age. A common though untested explanation for these patterns is that gender ideologies preconfigure how people seek confidants. We address the lack of direct tests by analyzing a cohort of 5487 U.S. older women and men from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Survey, which administered the Hegemonic Masculinity for Older Men Scale. We find that men have significantly lower odds than women do of having any confidant and of having both friends and family members as confidants. Among men, greater endorsement of hegemonic masculinity significantly lowered both odds. Of those with only one confidant type, women were more likely than men to nominate a family member over a friend. Among men, their endorsement of hegemonic masculinity was unrelated to their likelihood of nominating a family member over a friend. Findings show support for, but also the limitations of, assuming gender ideology explains confidant patterns. Future scholarship can work toward addressing how hegemonic masculinity inhibits social relations, particularly in older age. Keywords Measuring sex and gender . Gender ideology . Masculinity . Aging . Social networks . Confidants . Privacy . Disclosure
Personal relationships improve quality of life yet also play a role in gender inequality. The disparities in access to economic and social resources between cisgender men and women are partly due to differential access to social ties (Burt 1992; Moen 2001; Ridgeway and Smith-Lovin 1999), such as confidants, defined as individuals with whom we discuss important matters (McPherson et al. 2006). For example, men report having fewer confidants than women do (Cornwell 2011; McPherson et al. 2006; Pudrovska and Carr 2008; Schwartz and Litwin 2018), which constrains men’s access
* Celeste Campos-Castillo [email protected] 1
Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI 53201, USA
2
Department of Sociology and Lyman Briggs College, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
3
Department of Sociology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA
4
Health Management & Policy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
to social support when coping with stressful events, such as widowhood and divorce (Bookwala et al. 2014; Pudrovska and Carr 2008). Despite having fewer confidants, the composition of men’s confidants confer advantages to them over women’s. For example, men are more likely than women to have confidants outside the family (McPherson et al. 2006; Rid
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