Research shows that sexist attitudes are deeply ingrained, with adverse consequences in the socioeconomic and political sphere. We argue that parental leave for fathers—a policy reform that disrupts traditional gender roles and promotes less stereotypical ones—has the power to decrease attitudinal gender bias. Contrasting the attitudes of new parents who were (and were not) directly affected by a real-world policy reform that tripled the amount of fathers’ leave, we provide causal evidence that the reform increased gender-egalitarian views in the socioeconomic and political domains among mothers and fathers, and raised support for pro-female policies that potentially displace men among mothers. In contrast, informational, indirect exposure to the reform among the general public produced no attitudinal change. These results show that direct exposure to progressive social policy can weaken sexist attitudes, providing governments with a practical and effective tool to reduce harmful biases.

Competition between social units has long been central to sociological theories of change. Understanding it has become particularly important in the sociology of religion with the theory of religious economies, a market model of religious change. Existing empirical tests of the theory are limited by (1) ambiguity regarding which religious groups are expected to compete with which other groups, and/or (2) a neglect of the local level (competition among congregations). Using an original compilation of the life histories of religious congregations in Manhattan from 1949 to 1999, I conduct event-history analyses that avoid those limitations. The chief results are the following: (1) the more congregations there were near a given congregation that were theologically dissimilar to that congregation, the less likely that congregation was to advertise; (2) when there was an increase over time in the number of nearby congregations that were theologically similar to the focal congregation, that congregation became more likely to advertise; and (3) when there was an increase over time in the number of nearby congregations that were theologically dissimilar to the focal congregation, that congregation became less likely to advertise. Implications for the study of religion include modifications of religious-economies theory; broader implications speak to understanding the social units that compete and what drives competition.