Percentage of young Americans who disagreed with this statement: “It is much better for everyone involved
if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.”
Such slippage in support for gender equality may have been a factor in the 2016 election, even
though voters 18 to 30 were more likely than any other age group to vote for Hillary Clinton.
As a set of reports released Friday by the Council on Contemporary Families reveals, fewer of the youngest millennials,
those aged 18 to 25, support egalitarian family arrangements than did the same age group 20 years earlier.
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.
Using a survey that has monitored the attitudes of high school seniors for nearly 40 years, the sociologists Joanna Pepin and David Cotter find
that the proportion of young people holding egalitarian views about gender relationships rose steadily from 1977 to the mid-1990s but has fallen since.
Since 1994, young women’s confidence that employed women are just as good mothers
as stay-at-home moms has continued to inch up, but young men’s has fallen.
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.
