Millennials want women to stay at home, says new study

Survey finds regression in gender equality amongst today’s teenagers

Maybe this shouldn't have come as a surprise. Anyone who saw how Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton to become President of the United States back in January could guess that maybe gender relations are a little wonky in the twenty-first century. One step forward, two steps back, writes Marie Claire’s Kaitlin Menza.

Nonetheless, it was still surprising to read that a new study has learned millennials are actually moving away from gender equality in their households. The Council on Contemporary Families presented a finding this week that today's young people are less likely than young people of the 1990s to desire equality between spouses.

But the question is, how did we get here? A survey called Monitoring the Future has been distributed to tens of thousands of high-school students each year since the 1970s and a regression in gender equality has been noticed — not in the workplace, where young people want men and women to be treated equally, but at home!

There were two questions that garnered this conclusion. When asked if the participants agreed or disagreed with the statement, "The husband should make all the important decisions in the family," 63% of them disagreed. In 1994, 71% disagreed.

And when shown the statement, "It is usually better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family," only 42% of modern youngsters disagreed. In 1994, 58% disagreed. Could this mean that a majority of them think it's better when women stay home?



"These results are puzzling because population demographics are changing in ways that might be expected to produce greater support for egalitarian principles," study authors Joanna Pepin, PhD, and David Cotter, PhD wrote. "Families are increasingly likely to count on mothers' employment for economic stability, whether youth grow up in dual-earner households or single-mother families...We are left, then, searching for explanations in the realm of culture."

Considering this, one cannot help but wonder what happened in 1994 and 1995 to create this 20-year slip? Feel free to start analysing, or you know, bashing your head against a wall. Just make dinner for your husband first…

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