Women's Preference for Highbrow Culture Does Not Begin in the Family

Research reports that women are more likely than men to participate in highbrow cultural activities, but we do not know whether this gap develops within the family at an early age or is the outcome of economic and positional differences between men and women later in life. We use a Danish data set to analyze cultural participation among brothers and sisters from the same family and report three findings: (1) gender differences in highbrow cultural participation are mostly unrelated to family-background characteristics; (2) there is little evidence that parents engage in gender-specific cultural socialization; and (3) socioeconomic position and family obligations account for less than 20 percent of brother-sister differences in highbrow cultural participation. Our results suggest that gender differences in highbrow cultural participation originate in factors outside the family.