One evening during dinner, a friend confided that she had not been happy for a long time. She was the breadwinner, the homeowner, and the manager of all domestic tasks despite being in a relationship. She had hoped the balance would shift, but it never did. Her boyfriend desperately wanted children, but she was uncertain. She would have to carry and care for the baby, bear the majority of the responsibility for keeping the child alive, and pay the rent. What he contributed to the relationship did not seem sufficient in return. A few weeks later, they separated. Her story reflects a broader trend: among childless 18-34-year-olds who desire children and do not already have them, there are approximately 5 million more men than women. However, men in this demographic also struggle to achieve economic stability, complete college, and build meaningful social connections. This gender gap in aspirations for parenthood, and the factors driving it, could deepen growing public concern about America's declining birthrate.
Gen Z Women Witnessed Their Mothers' Struggles
While aspirations for fatherhood are most pronounced among conservative young men, according to the Young Men's Research Initiative, having children appears to be an important part of how most men envision success in their future. Extensive reporting has focused on Gen Z men and masculinity, as well as pronatalist movements and declining birthrates. As Gen Z women who research our peers, we explore the origins of the Gen Z parenthood divide and how it might be bridged. Spoiler: if having children meant carrying the responsibilities of our fathers, we believe we would be more inclined to participate.
The High Costs of Motherhood
Motherhood entails costs that can feel prohibitively high. The "motherhood penalty" remains stubbornly persistent: in nearly every country, women's employment fails to return to pre-birth levels within a decade of having children, while men experience an employment boost in their first year of fatherhood. Then there are the physical risks of pregnancy, especially for Black women, and the mental load and worry labor that disproportionately fall on mothers. Meanwhile, the opportunity cost of mothering has increased. The cost of child care has significantly outpaced inflation, making having children more expensive, but so has the value of what is given up with motherhood. The trade-off between earning potential and providing care labor has become more deeply imbalanced. The traditional village model of care, with nearby grandparents providing child care and children eventually returning the favor, has broken down, and we now buy it back through apps and care homes.
Bodily Autonomy and Motherhood
Motherhood seems antithetical to what we have learned about bodily autonomy, particularly at a time when abortion care is being rolled back and women's rights are retreating worldwide. Encounters with bodily violation have become normalized, from receiving IUDs inserted without adequate pain management to the one in three women globally who have been assaulted. Against this backdrop, the thought of becoming pregnant in a world that continues to deprioritize women's health feels like accepting the oldest lie: that women are only as essential as their wombs, and inferior, while men control the creation of life. With renewed examinations of "my body, my choice," women are asking real questions about what it truly means for them to carry a pregnancy and commit to a lifetime of parenthood.
Cultural Signals Pulling Men Away
Despite the progress made by millennial fathers, who participate more actively in their children's lives than men in previous generations, cultural signals continue to pull men in the opposite direction. In February, Scott Galloway, a prominent ally of the masculinity movement, argued that fathers do not need to be present for the first few months of a child's life. Hearing such rhetoric can make motherhood feel even more isolating, and as attitudes on gender equality seem to be regressing, motherhood feels more like a trap. Many of us have guarded against maternal tendencies as a result. From childhood, girls are judged on whether they would make good mothers: Are they caring enough? Kind enough to their dolls? Ambitious, but not too ambitious? For many of us, being complimented on our emotional skills or gentleness with a baby feels uncomfortable compared to being praised for our personality or intelligence. We think: It feels belittling, like the saying we often hear from older generations about "making someone a very lucky husband one day." For many Gen Z women, motherhood has come to feel diminishing, offering only a fraction of the possibility of who we can be as women.
Watching Our Mothers 'Have It All' Didn't Inspire Us
Our mothers were among the first generation of women who could have both a career and children. However, coupling careers with unchanged domestic duties at home meant a "second shift" that still constrained women's professional freedom. Despite some improvement, women's lives have never fully recalibrated, and we are increasingly doubtful that an equilibrium will ever be reached. In heterosexual marriages where the female partner is the breadwinner, she still performs more domestic and caregiving work than her male counterpart, at the expense of her leisure time. Even when the female partner is the sole earner, she still spends more time on housework than her male partner. But that data only accounts for what is on the surface. It does not capture the cognitive labor that occupies someone's headspace at all times, what economists refer to as the "mental load." Women still take on a disproportionate amount of the physical and cognitive labor involved in executing almost every domestic task. These tasks are unremunerated work: knowing every teacher's name, planning every detail of child care when traveling for work, or scheduling routine doctor's appointments. The energy someone exerts cognitively and physically on maintaining a household comes at a cost, diminishing their focus at work or ability to relax properly.
Gender Essentialism and Weaponized Incompetence
For too long, gender essentialism, the assumption that women simply care more about domestic and caregiving labor, are naturally better at it, or have higher standards than men, has provided a convenient cover for men's weaponized incompetence. It is telling that 42% of mothers look online for parenting advice monthly, compared to 22% of fathers, with just over half of dads saying they have ever visited any such sites. Gen Z women are desperately looking for signs that things will be different for us, but nothing is pointing that way. Millennial mothers are as burned-out as ever, and there are signs we might even have it worse, as young men in our generation are notoriously regressing in their perspectives on women's roles at home. For example, 31% of Gen Z men believe women should "always obey their husbands." Mothers are extraordinary, but the narrative that they can "do it all" is broken and unrealistic.
Marriage Benefits Men More Than Women
One of the most well-known statistics circulating among young women is that marriage benefits men more than women. Whether or not the data fully support this, the perception itself is real and consequential. According to one survey, only 32% of women believe that women who get married and have children live fuller, happier lives, compared to 49% of men who believe the same. There is a sense that women are draining themselves to provide for men, and our Gen X mothers are warning us not to end up in the same traps they did. With women in the U.S. outpacing men in college completion rates by over 10 percentage points, women today are in a stronger financial position, leaving them more room to negotiate without compromising on what they want from a partner. Gen Z women already know what motherhood looks like. Men do not seem to.
Gen Z Women Already Mother Their Partners
Some might argue that Gen Z women are already parenting pros: after all, we have mothered our ex-boyfriends. Many Gen Z couples got a preview of married life during COVID-19, "playing house" for the first time, when women still found themselves defaulting to cleaning up after their partners. Then there is the time we spend encouraging our partners to make plans with friends, stay organized, and check in on their families. We call this labor "mothering" or "mankeeping," language that empowers us to name our frustrations but leaves us hesitant to commit to a future where actual parenthood enters the equation. This imbalance might stem from the 16% of Gen Z men who are less likely to have noticed that their mothers did more housework. Boys and girls grow up observing the same households but seeing them differently. Boys are not socialized to notice domestic labor the way girls are. Women observe their female role models carefully, with an implicit awareness: one day I will be a woman, so let me learn how to do this. Boys do not necessarily apply the same lens to their mothers. There is also a breadwinner gap: more women than men recall their mother having paid employment, suggesting daughters are more attuned to the double shift, while sons remained insulated from it. The downstream consequences are enormous. If Gen Z men do not accurately perceive how unequal their own upbringing was, they have no baseline for what "equal" actually looks like, and we are all stuck in an entrenched cycle of gender inequity.
Men's Economic Contributions Declining
This coincides with a moment when men's economic contributions to households are declining, with more men out of employment than women. We are absorbing the fallout of men's social and economic dislocation. While young men believe that their financial status is a top characteristic for women considering them as a partner, women value kindness and honesty far more. As young women, we expect to share breadwinner status with our future spouses, and we are looking for partners who can share the care labor. In fact, there is a gross mismatch between what women want from men and what men think women want. Online, men's perception of what women find attractive is constrained by the male gaze: "looksmaxxing" for each other's approval. Men's ideas about what makes them desirable are drifting farther from what women actually want, and yet young men increasingly blame women for punishing them for their looks. In reality, we would take a therapy session over a hammered jaw any day.
Advice for Aspiring Fathers
If men want to be parents as much as the data implies, two things need to happen: we need to close the gap between aspiration and preparation for parenthood, and we need a version of fatherhood that absorbs more of the demands of motherhood. "What I see from speaking to young men is [that] a lot of their thinking around this is just ideas, not necessarily grounded with real-life examples," Elliott Rae, founder of Parenting Out Loud, a campaign fighting to improve support around men's caring responsibilities, told HuffPost. "The ideas come from what young men have been told, mainly online, about what their role in family life looks like." Scheduling your child's yearly check-up, learning how to braid hair, writing a grocery list from scratch, and knowing how to sit with your child's broken heart are the acts that constitute parenting in practice. "In a lot of cultures, men don't do much [of the household labor]—the expectation is on the oldest daughter to do a lot of the housework," Rae noted, adding that the solution cannot be found in simply encouraging sons to "chip in," but in raising all children with an equal understanding of what running a household actually involves. "We should not just encourage sons to do their domestic duty—cook, clean—but show equal treatment with our sons and daughters," Rae said.
Rethinking the Social Contract
The "aspiration gap" is closable, but it requires rethinking the social contract around parenthood for heterosexual couples. That starts with rethinking masculinity and broadening what it means to "provide" beyond financial contributions to encompass emotional labor, domestic consistency, and genuine presence. "To close the gap between aspiration and action," Rae argued, "we need to create more spaces for young men to connect and have mentoring relationships with slightly older men—a village of uncles, coaches—to know what it looks like to care, love, and parent within a family." We also need an expanded sense of what it means to "protect" beyond physicality, to instead support creating a true sense of safety. How do you create an environment in your home that encourages your child to open up? After all, most fathers want to feel as connected to their children as moms are. Men are instinctively caring but are too often socialized to repress their nurturing side by the time they reach adulthood, and yet young women are most excited by communication and kindness in a partner.
The Role of Paternity Leave
There is also a structural piece. Paternity leave offers more than just an extra pair of hands; it provides a developmental window to enable both partners to feel confident enough to read the signs of what is needed of them as parents. "It makes a difference who is seen as capable in parenting, and so can split the load," Rae said. The United States does not have a federal law guaranteeing paid parental leave, making it the only OECD member country, and one of six countries in the world, with no national paid parental leave policy. Around the world, countries like China, Hungary, and South Korea are striving to incentivize marriage and fertility with financial encouragement, to little avail. Yes, child care costs are exorbitant and a significant barrier to parenthood. However, the solution to the gender divide in parenting aspirations is not purely financial; it is also social. Countries like Rwanda, which is on track to become the first country with national fatherhood training, and Senegal, which is setting up Schools for Husbands, are paving the way.
Conclusion: The Gen Z Parenthood Divergence
Ultimately, if fatherhood looked like what the best fathers actually do, performing the worry labor and the care work, and not just the fun parts, more women might find themselves willing to say yes to becoming parents with men. While we do not expect men who have not been conditioned to give care to learn overnight, we do hope that those who want to be fathers take the time to learn what active fatherhood and healthy parenting look like. However, the Gen Z parenthood divergence is not a story of women retreating from family life. It is a story of women who have watched closely and understood exactly what is being asked of them. We would love to be dads. Who would not? We are just not willing to be mothers and fathers at the same time.
