Emily Jashinsky is the Washington correspondent for UnHerd and co-hosts the daily news show “Breaking Points.”
The sexes appear to be drifting apart before adolescence even ends. Strange as it may seem, young men today are more interested in marriage than young women. This trend is a recipe for social chaos.
Last month, Pew Research Center compared data from 1993 and 2023, finding 12th-grade boys are more likely than 12th-grade girls to say they want to get married someday, a flip from three decades ago. Boys’ plans for marriage have barely budged since 1993, dropping to 74 percent from 76 percent. Girls, however, swung away from marriage by double digits. In the early 1990s, 83 percent of girls wanted to get married. In 2023, 61 percent said the same.
In 2012, I worked for Christina Hoff Sommers on the rerelease of her landmark 2000 book “The War Against Boys.” Part of my job was to check the footnotes for outdated research. When the first edition came out, I was one of the kids in Christina’s book: a 7-year-old public school girl whose education had been designed to uplift young women and help us get to college. As Christina’s intern, I was a university student surrounded by rudderless men with bubbling anger.
As I watched Christina chart the course of boys from 2000 to 2013, when the rerelease hit shelves, I learned that her warning at the turn of the millennium proved prescient. Girls will not be helped if boys are hurt. Ultimately, as she documented, boys tend to like different books than girls; they prefer tinkering and hands-on learning; many thrive in technical education programs; and they need more recess and play.
Pew’s findings should be considered alongside an NBC News survey published in September that found lifestyle preferences falling along partisan lines. “Gen Z men who voted for Trump rate having children as the most important thing in their personal definition of success,” NBC News reported. “Gen Z women who voted for Harris ranked having children as the second-least important thing in their personal definition of success.”
Unsurprisingly, young women are also more likely to identify as liberal, and the margin is widening. As the New York Times reported, “Today, around 40 percent identify as liberal, compared with just 19 percent who say they’re conservative. The views of young men — who are more likely to be conservative than liberal — have changed little.”
What seems to be changing is women’s expectations, and the likely culprit is men’s prospects. If 6 in 10 girls still say they want to get married, what’s going on with the two who changed their minds since 1993? A January paper summarized by the American Institute for Boys and Men found: “Historical data show that when men’s educational and economic outcomes decline, it is women without a college degree who experience the sharpest declines in marriage rates.”
Women’s perceived appeal as marriage partners is not declining, but men’s is. So, as some men struggle for economic opportunity, women are adjusting their expectations and desires. It’s true that pop culture’s libertine ethos often suggests marriage and child rearing are outdated goals that need not weigh too heavily on the modern woman. This probably makes it easier for some women to say they’re less interested in these goals, although research continues to show that married mothers and fathers are the happiest among us.
But that messaging has been around since the 1970s, and monoculture is dead. The “tradwife” phenomenon sees traditionalist influencers attracting cultlike followings in niche corners of the internet, where it’s cool to run farms and have eight kids who home-school. Gen Z is having less sex, too. Young women consistently report higher levels of anxiety. The NBC News survey found that “one-third of young women said they feel anxious ‘almost all of the time,’ and an additional third reported being anxious ‘most of the time,’” while “just under 2 in 10 Gen Z men reported feeling anxious all of the time.”
Looking out on a pool of less marriageable men, young women are turning their backs on the institution, bolstered by cultural messaging from academia to Hollywood that remains critical of more conservative lifestyles. While the country rightfully spent recent decades boosting the educational and economic prospects of women, it deindustrialized, axing and outsourcing jobs in heavily male industries, and leaving men and women increasingly out of step with one another. Efforts to make the workforce and education system more friendly for girls have led to emphasizing literacy and verbal skills, a hemorrhaging of male teachers, and the decline of shop classes and vocational programs.
The problem seems poised to worsen. The marriage gap between rich and working-class Americans is becoming a gulf as the education system adapted to help girls without adjusting to maintain best practices for boys.
A paper published by the American Institute for Boys and Men in January found that “as college men have become increasingly scarce, college women have maintained stable marriage rates by marrying economically well-off non-college men. Meanwhile, economic outcomes for other non-college men have sharply declined, accompanied by a drop in marriage rates for non-college women.”
The trend line of women reporting a declining desire to marry may indeed reflect pessimism about their prospects rather than the institution itself — and not for ideological reasons so much as practical ones. If the last several decades have taught us anything about the battle of the sexes, we should remember the “war on boys” is also a war on girls.
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