Millennials stall the gender revolution in the home

Millennials, the American variety at least, are a contrary lot, are they not? One moment they are waxing hysterical about microaggressions on their university campus; the next, we hear that they want traditional families. That is overstating the issue,of couse, but new research shows that people aged 17 to 34 in the US are now significantly less keen on “gender equality” as a basis for family life than the same age group was 20 years ago.

Millennial men, the headlines tell us, prefer stay-at-home wives. And their female counterparts, to a lesser extent, agree. How can this be?

Those who came to adulthood post year 2000 are the generation who were supposed to complete the egalitarian revolution in the home; instead they are putting the whole enterprise in doubt. How much that would matter depends on whether the enterprise itself is sound.

The intriguing thing is that this change is found among the youngest millennials. Sociologists Joanna Pepin and David Cotter used a survey that has monitored the attitudes of high school seniors for nearly 40 years. They found that the proportion of these young people holding egalitarian views about gender relationships rose steadily from 1977 to the mid-1990s, but has fallen since. Stephanie Coontz writes in the New York Times:

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