The political scientist Dan Cassino suggests that the increased support for male leadership in home life among 18- to 25-year-olds may reflect an attempt to compensate for men’s loss of dominance in the work world. Youths surveyed in 2014 grew up in the shadow of the financial crisis, which accelerated the longstanding erosion of men’s earning power. During the 2016 primaries, when Professor Cassino asked voters questions designed to remind them that many women now earn more than men, men became less likely to support Mrs. Clinton. Perhaps a segment of youth is reacting to financial setbacks suffered by their fathers. Indeed, a 2015 poll commissioned by MTV found that 27 percent of males aged 14 to 24 felt women’s gains had come at the expense of men.
It’s not just the youngest millennials who seem resistant to continuing the gender revolution. Overall, Americans aged 18 to 34 are less comfortablethan their elders with the idea of women holding roles historically held by men. And millennial men are significantly more likely than Gen X or baby boomer men to say that society has already made all the changes needed to create equality in the workplace.
Are we facing a stall or even a turnaround in the movement toward gender equality? That’s a possibility, especially if we continue to pin our hopes on an evolutionary process of generational liberalization. But there is considerable evidence that the decline in support for “nontraditional” domestic arrangements stems from young people witnessing the difficulties experienced by parents in two-earner families. A recent study of 22 European and English-speaking countries found that American parents report the highest levels of unhappiness compared with non-parents, a difference the researchers found is “entirely explained” by the absence of policies supporting work-family balance.
No wonder some young people think that more traditional family arrangements might make life less stressful. Tellingly, support for gender equality has continued to rise among all age groups in Europe, where substantial public investments in affordable, high-quality child care and paid leave for fathers and mothers are the norm.
The availability of such options increasingly outweighs cultural support for traditional gender arrangements. When young Americans are asked about their family aspirations, large majorities choose equally shared breadwinning and child-rearing if the option of family-friendly work policies is mentioned.
Furthermore, the financial advantages of dual-earner couples over male-breadwinner families have increased significantly in recent years, and an unequal division of housework has become progressively more damaging to relationships. The minority of couples who do manage to divide chores and child-rearing equally report higher levels of marital and sexual satisfaction, and more frequent sex, than do men and women in homes where the wife does most of the housework and child care.
But most young parents will not be able to sustain egalitarian values and practices without better work-family policies. Those should be possible to attain, given that more than 80 percent of Americans — and strong majorities of both sexes — support paid leave for mothers, with 70 percent favoring it for fathers, too. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, that rises to 91 percent favoring paid leave for mothers and 82 percent favoring it for fathers.
If, but only if, we can win such reforms, we may find that rather than growing out of youthful egalitarian idealism, as the popular view of aging might lead us to expect, more young Americans may grow into it, creating the most egalitarian family arrangements yet.
Update: After this article was posted, 2016 data from the General Social Survey became available, adding some nuance to this analysis. The latest numbers show a rebound in young men’s disagreement with the claim that male-breadwinner families are superior. The trend still confirms a rise in traditionalism among high school seniors and 18-to-25-year-olds, but the new data shows that this rise is no longer driven mainly by young men, as it was in the General Social Survey results from 1994 through 2014.