So it seems that the majority of youngsters aged between 18 and 25 today do not support a democratic family arrangement.
It seems the proportion of today’s millennials supporting equal gender rights, say sociologists, has fallen from the 1970s!
Generally defined as people born between 1982 and 2000, millennials were supposed to be the generation that forged what has been called ‘a new national consensus’ in favour of gender equality.
As a set of reports released 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.
Using a survey that has monitored the attitudes of high school seniors for nearly 40 years, sociologists Joanna Pepin and David Cotter find the proportion of young people holding unbiased views about gender relationships rose steadily from 1977 to the mid-1990s, but has fallen since.
In 1994, only 42 per cent of high school seniors agreed that the best family was one where the man was the main income earner and the woman took care of the home. But in 2014, 58pc of seniors said they preferred that arrangement.
In 1994, fewer than 30pc of high school seniors thought “the husband should make all the important decisions in the family.” By 2014, nearly 40pc subscribed to that premise.
Women’s disagreement fell far less, from 85pc in 1994 to 72pc in 2014. 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. In fact, by 2014, men aged 18 to 25 were more traditional than their elders.
So how or why did the support for gender equality slip down the slopes?!
American political scientist Dan Cassino suggests 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 last year’s election primaries in the US, when Professor Cassino asked voters questions designed to remind them that many women now earn more than men, he says men became less likely to support Hilary Clinton in the elections.
Interestingly millennial men are significantly more likely than Gen X or baby boomer men to say society has already made all the changes needed to create equality in the workplace.
So is there a turnaround in the movement toward gender equality?
Yes and it seems 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 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.
Diversity leads to better decision making, at least that is what I believe.
It has been shown that in countries where there are women in political leadership, economic inequality is low, between income groups and between genders.
“When women are in power they make, in part, decisions that are representative of other women’s needs, whether that’s better water infrastructure in a rural area in India or better care policies for families in an advanced economy like the US,” says head of education, gender and work and member of executive committee, World Economic Forum Geneva Saadia Zahidi.