Gen Z Men Will Never Be Breadwinners
So why do so many still want ‘traditional’ wives?
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Almost a third of Gen Z men — those born between 1997 and 2012 — believe a wife should obey her husband, according to a survey by Ipsos and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London, released for this year’s International Women’s Day (IWD).
Across the entire sample, which included more than 23,000 people in 29 countries, the situation was admittedly less extreme — about one in five respondents agreed with this statement. In the US, the proportion was slightly above the global average, at 23%, while in Australia and the UK, it dropped to 18% and 13%, respectively. In some places, however, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and India, over half of the population surveyed held this belief.
Still, what’s most worrying is that Gen Z men seem to cling more tightly to ‘traditional’ gender roles than any previous generation. A third, for example, also believe that a husband should have the final say in important decisions, compared with just 17% of baby boomer men (born 1946–1964). And nearly a quarter think women shouldn’t appear too independent or self-sufficient, double the share among men in that older cohort.
This is quite paradoxical. For one, because young people are often assumed to be more, not less, likely to reject rigid social expectations, including those related to gender. But also because young men today hardly fit the traditional masculinity mould either.
In fact, it’s hard to imagine that most of them ever will.
Even during the periods we tend to imagine as the height of traditional gender roles, male authority in the household — and women’s supposed obedience — were never entirely automatic. A man’s privilege and power in the home were instead largely conditional on his ability to provide.
As historian John Tosh writes in A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-class Home in Victorian England:
This [breadwinning] was what justified the husband in demanding the deference and obedience of his wife and children. Failure to provide was unmanly and undermined the claim to authority. Hence for a wife to make this charge against her husband was to strike him at his most vulnerable point — sometimes at the cost of inciting him to violence.
The term ‘breadwinner’ itself only really caught on in the early Victorian period, i.e., the first half of the nineteenth century. By that point, domestic production (making goods at home) was becoming outdated, and labour increasingly meant work done outside the home, usually for a wage or salary. And among some socio-economic groups, it was mostly men who ‘won’ the bread, while women’s labour at home faded into the near-invisible background.
The key phrase here, though, is ‘some’. For upper-class Victorians, earning bread was rarely a must, although their lives were still structured along gender lines, with men managing estates, finances, public roles, etc., while women handled domestic and social duties. Among the working classes, on the other hand — the majority, making up around 75–85% — paid work and breadwinning weren’t just male domains. Analysis of nineteenth-century census data from England and Wales by researchers Amanda Wilkinson and Edward Higgs shows that many married women worked, too. Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin also uncovered a similar pattern in her research on the US labour force.
Even during the supposedly halcyon mid-20th-century ‘housewife era,’ a period heavily curated by glossy magazines and advertisements promoting the idealised image of eternally cheerful homemakers, not all women stayed home, especially those who weren’t white, and not all men were the sole earners. In fact, in the US in 1950, married women in the workforce outnumbered single women — 8.6 million to 5.6 million.
The breadwinner model was neither ‘universal’ nor ‘traditional.’ Yet it took root in our cultural imagination anyway. And although there was another version of martial masculinity taking shape in the nineteenth century as well — following the British Empire’s intensified imperialist ambitions in the 1880s — defined by toughness, aggression, and obedience to higher-ranking men, traditional masculinity came to be mostly equated with authority earned through money and status.
Of course, a man’s ability to perform this role depended on a number of conditions other than class, particularly later on: women being excluded or discouraged from pursuing higher education and many professional careers, which limited their access to well-paid work, yes, but also steady employment and a single income being enough to support a family.
So what happens when few, if any, of these conditions can be met, but some still hold tight to these old norms?
The IWD survey also shows that the gap in beliefs between Gen Z men and women tends to be wider than in previous generations, particularly when it comes to gender roles and equality.
More than half (54%) of Gen Z women now identify as feminists and agree that things would work better if women held more leadership positions, both figures higher than among women in any previous age group, and much higher than among Gen Z men. The overwhelming majority also rejects the idea that a wife should obey her husband, or that marriage suffers if a man stays at home to raise children while his partner works.
But perhaps the most surprising gap shows up in attitudes toward the attractiveness of women’s professional success (see the bottom-right chart below). While Gen Z women are slightly less likely than Millennial women to say that successful women are attractive to men, Gen Z men are the most likely demographic group — across all ages and genders — to say so.
If you tried to stitch together the ideal partner based on what some Gen Z men say they want, you’d likely end up with a peculiar hybrid: a woman who’s ambitious and professionally accomplished, enjoying the freedoms won by the women’s rights movements in public life and earning a good income, yet still willing to stick to old gender rules at home.
But given all the other recent studies pointing to widening ideological, religious, and political divides between young men and women, there simply aren’t many women who fit that description — and certainly not enough to match the demand. After all, that gap shows up even among young people who share the same politics. A recent NBC News Decision Desk poll, for instance, found that right-wing Gen Z men see marriage and parenthood as life’s ultimate achievements, while their female peers are more likely to value… independence and spirituality.
Some young men might want to cosplay as well-off Victorians or characters from 1950s ads, but they can neither easily find women willing to play along nor realistically live up to those roles themselves — and they seem to be aware of that, too. The old traditional gender bargain has collapsed, both socially and economically.
Younger generations, in particular, are up against a grim economic reality. Youth unemployment is often twice as high as for everyone else, so many struggle to find stable, long-term work. Meanwhile, wages have stagnated while housing costs have shot up, making it much, much harder to buy a home now than it was for previous generations. For most households, a single income is also no longer enough to cover even basic living expenses.
I’d argue that it’s precisely this mix of economic precarity and status anxiety stemming from failing to meet masculine expectations that fuels the political and ideological gender gap among young people. The online ‘manosphere,’ along with right-wing populists, then exploit this sentiment by promising a return to the so-called ‘good old days’ of male breadwinners and female homemakers. For many young men, this presents a seemingly straightforward, even if ultimately illusory, solution to their problems.
In the most extreme scenario, this would entail forcing women out of the workforce en masse. In the short term, a smaller labour supply could indeed push wages up in some sectors. But over time, removing millions of workers would shrink consumer demand, cut economic output, and make the whole economy smaller — an illustration of what economists call the ‘lump of labour’ fallacy, the mistaken belief that there’s only so much work to go around. What’s far more likely is that shutting women out would push wages and household incomes down, and then hand even more power and wealth to those already at the top.
So, yes, we’d manage to turn back the clock. But not exactly to better times.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that most young and young-ish people — Gen Z and Millennials alike — feel as though the rug has been pulled out from under us, and no matter how hard we try to find stability or certainty in this reality, we end up failing, often miserably. And when the world outside your own bubble feels out of control, it can perhaps be tempting to try to tighten your grip on what happens inside it instead.
Although the breadwinner model at the heart of old-school masculinity is no longer economically or socially viable for most men, especially young men, they can still look for other ways to assert authority. The fantasy of an obedient ‘trad’ wife at home and a modern woman in the workforce is one such shortcut. In this arrangement, young men can gain the sense of symbolic dominance and validation that once mostly came with being a provider, without actually being one.
In practice, though, it’s actually women who do more of the ‘providing’, since they contribute through both paid labour and through the unpaid domestic, care, and emotional labour that keeps everything running.
But being stuck in the past, or caught in these fantasies, will ultimately hurt all of our futures. Young men won’t find control or security by clinging to social and economic systems that have always relied on the exploitation and subordination of a vast underclass of women — and men. Or by directing anger at women and their hard-won independence instead.
The way forward isn’t through symbolic power plays, trad-life fantasies, or a rollback of women’s economic security and independence. The way forward is through rewriting the old scripts around gender and relationships, but also work.
Men shouldn’t have to be breadwinners. Most men never really were — and certainly not if you look at the whole of human history rather than just the last couple of centuries — and most likely never will be. But women shouldn’t have to be, either. If initiatives such as a universal basic income were taken seriously, and the pressure to work to survive were lifted, relationships could be freed from financial stress and old hierarchies that still haunt so many of them. And they might become something else entirely. Something much better.
There are many things we could control if we only collectively set our minds to it instead of turning on one another.
The good news is that the latest IWD survey shows that in many countries, the die-hard defenders of traditional gender roles are in the minority, even if that minority is bigger than we might hope, and likely a tad bigger than it was some years ago.
Unfortunately, progress tends to be wonky. We take one step forward, then two or more steps back. And then we start again and again.
Still, young men and everyone else would do well to keep their eyes on the road ahead, not the rearview mirror, and keep taking those steps forward.
Only one issue with this. Men don’t want equal relationships. If they did, that’s exactly what we would already have.
Moving away from patriarchy is better for everyone, men and women alike. The Nordic countries and New Zealand prove this. They’re consistently ranked among both the most gender-equal and the happiest societies in the world, with high numbers of women in government and business and strong protections against gender-based violence.