A new study of high school seniors from the Council of Contemporary Families is raising eyebrows this week.
The results of the study, which analyzes the results of a survey that’s tracked the opinions of high school seniors’ for 40 years, suggest that young people are increasingly likely to support traditional gender roles in the home — a finding that seems surprising given society’s increasingly progressive outlook on gender.
Reporting on their findings, the authors wrote, “After becoming more egalitarian for almost twenty years, high school seniors’ thinking about a husband’s authority and divisions of labor at home has since become substantially more traditional.”
They continued:
[blockquote]In 1976, when they were asked whether ‘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,’ fewer than 30 percent of high school seniors disagreed. By 1994, disagreement with the claim that the male breadwinner-female homemaker family is the best household arrangement had almost doubled, rising to 58 percent. By 2014, however, it had fallen back to 42 percent — a decline of 16 percentage points since its peak in 1994. In 1976, a majority of high school seniors (59 percent) disagreed with the statement that ‘the husband should make all the important decisions in the family.’ This rose to 71 percent by 1994 but fell back to 63 percent by 2014.[/blockquote]
“This does not mean the next generation of college students has completely shifted back to more traditional views of the roles of the sexes,” Time argued in its report on the survey, “Those same young people were just as likely to be supportive of mothers working, of women in leadership positions outside the home and of women having equal opportunities to employment as were the school leavers of 1994.”
People have pointed to various explanations to justify this pattern, arguing that obstacles in the workplace are causing attitudes to revert, or that men are reacting negatively to their counterparts’ professional advancements.
The numbers, however, actually called to mind an interesting possibility raised articulately by the American Enterprise Institute’s Christina Hoff Sommers in recent years.
Summarizing a 2008 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Sommers wrote in 2014, “Personality differences between men and women are the largest and most robust in the more prosperous, egalitarian, and educated societies. According to the authors, ‘Higher levels of human development — including long and healthy life, equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth — were the main nation-level predictors of larger sex differences in personality.'”
Sommers continued, “The authors of the study hypothesize that prosperity and equality bring greater opportunities for self-actualization. Wealth, freedom, and education empower men and women to be who they are.”
What if, perhaps, the results of the CCF survey of high school seniors are simply an indication that this pattern flagged by Sommers is manifesting itself in the next generation of adults?
As young people exist in a world with more and more freedoms, it is possible those freedoms are enabling them to embrace their instinctive conceptions of gender, rather than reject the traditional customs from which we expect them to run.
Of course, more research is needed to substantiate that theory. But it’s a possibility worth raising as we seek to understand the shifting attitudes of America’s youth.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
