The manosphere and tradwife culture have won

Suddenly, more teens think unequal pay for women and rigid gender roles are good

In the early 20^th century, it was unusual for married women – especially White married women – to work outside the home. The number of women working for pay increased in the 1950s, but women’s work was often part-time, underpaid, or both. Less than 10% of lawyers were women; when future Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor graduated at the top of her Stanford Law School class in 1952, no law firm would hire her (at least as an attorney; one offered her a position as a secretary). Medical schools routinely capped their enrollment of women at no more than 5% of the entering classes.

Then, from the late 1960s to the 1980s, the number of women business leaders, TV reporters, lawyers, professors, engineers, and doctors shot upward. For several decades, half of newly minted doctors and lawyers have been women.

Laws and attitudes have followed suit. Equal pay for equal work is the law, and rejection of rigid gender roles skyrocketed among American adults between the 1970s and the early 2020s (see Figure 3.22 in Generations).

Questions about equal pay and gender roles have also been asked of teens – specifically, of 8^th and 10^th graders (ages 13 to 16) from 1991 to 2024. My colleagues and I had previously found that 12^th graders’ attitudes toward women working had gotten more positive between the 1970s and 2013. But a lot has changed, culturally and politically, since then. For one thing, 13- to 16-year-olds are often immersed in social media, some of them in the so-called manosphere promoting traditional gender roles (often along with a heavy dose of misogyny; last year, the Netflix movie Adolescence did an excellent job showing the impact of manosphere influencers on young males). Both Trump’s first term (2017-2021) and second term (2025-present) have coincided with a rightward shift in the country. Still, political shifts don’t always show up in real people’s attitudes, and even in this environment it would be surprising if teens were questioning the idea that women should be paid equally for the same work.

But they are.