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Conservatives like to complain that kids these days are too woke and that young men, in particular, are becoming too soft. Yet, the reality is that young people — especially young men — are embracing sexism at rates far higher than men their fathers’ and grandfathers’ age.
Ipsos’s 2024 International Women’s Day poll, for example, found that nearly half of American men think men are expected to do too much to support gender equality (47 percent) and that we’ve gone so far in promoting gender equality that we’re hurting men (47 percent). Those numbers are higher than what Ipsos found when they asked the same questions in 2019. And the surveys show that, for men, those attitudes are more common among Gen Z and millennials than they are among boomers and Gen X.
It’s easy to wonder why young men are buying into sexist ideologies, particularly if — like Kansas City Chiefs Kicker Harrison Butker, who recently told a stadium full of college graduates that men should fight against “cultural emasculation” and that women are happiest as homemakers — they have cancer-curing medical physicist moms.
My research — including more than 400 hours of interviews and surveys with more than 4,000 people across the US — suggests that the appeal of these messages stems, at least in part, from the precarity of our DIY Society. Unlike other countries, which have invested in social safety nets to protect people from poverty, give them a leg-up in reaching opportunities, and ensure they have the time and energy to participate in the shared project of care, the US has dumped all that responsibility on individuals and told us to figure it out for ourselves. That DIY model exacerbates inequality, because the more resources you have, the easier it is to outsource the less-rewarded responsibilities — like housework, childcare, and eldercare — that you’ve been handed and focus on more economically valued pursuits, instead. And so, the rich have gotten richer and, in the process, life has gotten more precarious for everyone but those at the very top.
Faced with that precarity, it’s easy for men — especially young men — to believe that their own best shot at climbing the economic ladder comes from having a woman at home to prop them up behind the scenes. Research shows, for example, that having a homemaker wife is one of the best ways for men to get ahead in their own careers.
Being that homemaker wife and mother isn’t all that great for women. After accounting for differences in people’s resources and opportunities, American women tend to be happier if they don’t have young children than if they do, happier when they’re working for pay than when they’re not employed, and happier when they’re not married than when they are. That’s because being a homemaker limits the leverage women have to get men to help at home, and because carrying all that responsibility leaves women with little time for leisure or sleep. Research even shows that fathers enjoy spending time with their kids more than mothers do, though that’s because most dads spend limited time with their kids, and the time they do spend is usually fun family time, while more of the parenting — and especially the grunt work of parenting — gets left to moms.
Despite the risks of the “tradwife” life for women, men don’t want to think of themselves as “bad guys” if they lean on their wives and girlfriends and sisters and mothers so they can get ahead in their own careers. And that’s where the myth of Mars and Venus comes in. That myth suggests that women are just happier at home folding laundry and nursing babies, because men and women are “naturally” suited for different and complementary roles. Which also feeds into the related myth that it’s best for children and for society more generally if every household has a dad at work and a mom at home.
Many men (and even some women) believe these ideas. Surveys show that more than a third of American men believe that biological differences between men and women lead them to have different interests and different parenting roles. In practice, these ideas discourage men from trying to improve their caregiving skills or help women more at home. One dad I interviewed described with a sort of befuddled reverence how his wife, who works for pay only part-time, is able to care for their toddler and preschooler while also cleaning, cooking, and getting laundry done. “How she does it,” he told me, “I don’t know. Days I’m home with the boys by myself it’s like it’s all I can do is focus on keeping them alive and she’s doing it all.” In essence, believing that women are just “naturally” better at caregiving encourages learned helplessness among men.
These ideas about the “natural” differences between men and women have deep historical roots. Charles Darwin, for example, set off on his own expeditions with the goal of proving that men should be the ones to run society, while women were confined to the home. In the field, however, Darwin only considered evidence that fit his evolutionary theory of gender roles. He argued in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex that men, as the hunters, evolved to be “more courageous, pugnacious, and energetic” and to have more “inventive genius” than women, while women, as the gatherers, evolved to be more nurturing, cooperative, and docile, given their dependence on men.
Darwin’s “evidence” was taken as gospel — especially given how it echoed Biblical views. And yet, more rigorous (and ethical) scientists have debunked Darwin’s claims. Reviewing all the studies of hunter-gatherer societies conducted between the 1800s and the 2020s, a team of biologists found that in 79 percent of those societies, women and girls were being trained to hunt and regularly did so alongside boys and men. That evidence was there all along. It was simply ignored because it didn’t fit the convenient explanation for patriarchy that Darwin’s assumptions provide.
Despite that evidence, men like Harrison Butker and Andrew Tate (an influencer known for misogynistic views and promoting a hyper-masculine lifestyle) continue to promote the myth of Mars and Venus. Butker, for example, attributes all his success to his wife Isabelle and to her decision to “embrace one of the most important titles of all: homemaker.” Tate, a kickboxer-turned-Youtuber, tells his massive following of mostly teenage boys that “real” men make tons of money, while “real” women “prioritize their roles as wives and mothers over pursuing careers.” Tate has even argued that women should be men’s property in marriage, though he later claimed that comment was a joke.
The Butkers and Tates of the world empower men and boys to see themselves as “good guys” if they focus on paid work rather than caregiving, and especially if they earn enough to persuade their wives to stay home and focus on raising their kids. In the process, however, the Butkers and the Tates are really empowering capitalist systems of exploitation, and empowering men and boys to gaslight any girl or woman who tries to complain. Because believing the myths that the Butkers and the Tates are selling allows boys and men to feel like heroes, even as they’re hurting the women on whose backs they stand while they try to climb from precarity to prosperity without a decent net to catch them if they fall.
Of course, standing on women isn’t the only solution to the precarity of our DIY Society. It’s just the standard playbook that America likes to follow. A better way would be to build the kind of social safety net that other countries take for granted. One that gives us all surer footing to stand on. One that reduces the incentive for men to get ahead on the backs of women. And one that allows men to see themselves as “good guys” — not because they make enough money to allow their wives to stay home but because they’re equal partners in the shared project of care.
Jessica Calarco is a Sociologist and Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an award-winning teacher, a leading expert on inequalities in family life and education, and the author of Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Social Safety Net (Portfolio/Penguin, 2024). Jessica has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and CNN. She also blogs at ParenthoodPhD and is a mom of two young kids.
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