gender

This recent coverage of family friendly policies and men in academia made us want to look again at Erin Anderson’s post from earlier this year.

U.S. fathers are eager to be more involved in the care of their infants and young children—per much research and many people’s personal accounts. The New York Times recently reported on men who have pursued legal action against their employers as a challenge to discriminatory policies and practices that prevent or limit the time they have available to utilize parental leave. Additionally, a recent survey of American fathers found an overwhelming majority, 89 percent, rated paid parental leave provided by an employer as an important workplace benefit. But consider this: there is also significant evidence that men are not likely to use parental leave, even when it is paid.

Because the leave mandated by the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act is unpaid (and simply unavailable to many Americans), many fathers can’t use it due to financial constraints. If paternity leave was paid, and resulted in no lost income, would men be more likely to take it? In our current economic climate, the answer is not so clear. My recent research on men in academia reveals that many fathers are uninterested, hesitant, or fearful that if they step away from their workplaces for most or all of the 15 weeks their employer offers in parental leave, their careers will suffer.

Some people think that academic institutions are paragons of research, discovery, and innovation that would, of course, be on the leading edge of progressive policies that would allow employees to balance the needs of work and family. This, however, is not the case. Few colleges and universities offer paid leave for mothers that doesn’t require the use of sick or vacation time to cover lost wages, and many schools actually violate federal law with their parental leave policies. Fewer still extend parental leave benefits to fathers. Furthermore, the tenure process puts pressure on young faculty, those who might be looking simultaneously at the tenure clock and their biological clocks. And the vulnerability of some staff positions or the demands on administrators means they are also not likely to take any extended leaves for the birth or adoption of a child.

Originally impressed by the decade long policy of gender neutral parental leave at the institution I recently studied, I ultimately found that policy and practices were seldom in alignment. Through interviews with men, both faculty and staff, employed in higher education within an institution with a generous parental leave policy, I learned that the opinions of colleagues and the needs of co-workers often took precedence over the wishes of a spouse and the needs of a new baby. In general, the men I interviewed still defined a significant part of their family role as that of provider, regardless of their partner’s employment status. Even though a policy of parental leave existed, and even though many of the women with whom they worked had utilized the leave, many fathers worried about the future consequences for their careers if they took any significant time out for parenting. Would co-workers resent them for taking the time off and possibly burdening colleagues with additional responsibilities? Would supervisors question their commitment to their careers or the institution? Would they lose future opportunities or rewards in their workplace if they took parental leave?

Without a doubt, we need more realistic and generous policies that allow workers, men and women, to meet the needs of their families and their workplaces. But people also need to use the policies that are available. The fact that this workplace offered a policy, but few men felt they could use it without suffering consequences, demonstrates the power of the workplace culture and the resistance many employees feel to rocking the boat, especially following a period of economic tumult. Moreover, when it is largely women who utilize parental leave, we reinforce gendered patterns of care work and continue to disadvantage women in the workplace.

These and other issues related to the individual and institutional factors that influence combining paid work and care work in academia are examined more closely in a collection I recently co-edited with Catherine Richards Solomon, Family Friendly Policies and Practices in Academe.

Erin K. Anderson is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Washington College. Her research focuses on the experiences of gender at individual, interactional, and institutional levels. Her most recent work appears in Family Friendly Policies and Practices in Academe.

A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Sharon Sassler, Professor, Department of Policy Analysis & Management, Cornell University. You can also see some of the popular impact here. 

In the 1940s and 1950s, the consensus of the emerging profession of marital counseling was that marital happiness and sexual satisfaction depended upon a couple’s adherence to traditional gender roles, with the husband doing the bulk of the breadwinning and the wife doing most of the housework. Influential economists such as Gary Becker (A Treatise on the Family, 1981) argued that following such a conventional division of labor by gender would lead to the greatest marital intimacy and sexual attraction between husband and wife.

Indeed, as recently as 2013, an article in the American Sociological Review found that couples who divided housework more equally had lower marital and sexual satisfaction and less frequent sex than couples where the woman did the bulk of the household labor.[i] The authors concluded that conventional masculine and feminine behaviors at home served as sexual “turn-ons” for men and women, while nontraditional behaviors, consciously or unconsciously, turned people off.

But these studies relied on data from the 1980s and early 1990s, and thus represented marriages formed before the recent surge in dual-earner families and social approval of egalitarian gender roles. My co-authors and I compared findings based on data collected 22 to 24 years ago, in the second wave of the National Survey on Families and Households, with data from the 2006 Marital and Relationship Survey. As we describe in a forthcoming study in The Journal of Marriage and Family, the association between a non-traditional division of labor at home and couples’ sexual satisfaction and frequency has changed dramatically over the past two decades. By 2006, couples who reported sharing housework fairly equally, with the man doing more than a third and up to 65 percent of the housework, reported having sex significantly more often than did couples where the woman (or the man) did 65 percent or more of the housework.

In fact, contemporary couples who adhere to this more egalitarian division of labor are the only couples who have experienced an increase in sexual frequency compared to their counterparts of the past, whereas other groups – including those where the woman does the bulk of the housework – have experienced declines in sexual frequency. This finding is particularly notable given reports indicating that sexual frequency has generally declined worldwide over the past few decades.[ii]

What’s going on here? Couples report having more and higher quality sex when they are satisfied with their relationships. In today’s social climate, relationship quality and stability are generally highest when couples divide up the household labor in a way they see as equitable or fair. And the evidence shows that when men do a greater share of housework, women’s perceptions of relationship fairness and satisfaction are greater. In fact, how housework was arranged mattered more for couples surveyed in 2006 than it did among those interviewed in the late 1980s. It is therefore not surprising that couples with more egalitarian divisions of routine housework report being more satisfied with sexual intimacy today than they did 20 years ago. Sharing housework is now perceived as a sexual turn-on.

In our study, the reported sexual satisfaction of couples with egalitarian housework arrangements was about the same as that of more traditional couples, even though sexual frequency was higher. A different analysis of the same data–which compared the sexual satisfaction of couples who shared childcare equally, couples where the woman did most of the childcare, and couples where men did most of the childcare–found that the egalitarian child-raising couples not only reported more frequent sex but also higher sexual satisfaction than couples where the woman did most of the childcare. Today’s sexual scripts clearly have been realigned to value sharing the housework load over role specialization.

As June brides and grooms settle in for the long haul after coming back from the honeymoon and writing their thank-you notes, they might want to make sure their “to do” lists include a fair division of the dishes and laundry.

First published 6/20/2016.

About the author: Sharon Sassler is Professor, Department of Policy Analysis & Management, Cornell University. (Sharon.Sassler@Cornell.Edu).

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[i] Kornrich, S., Brines, J., & Leupp, K. (2013). Egalitarianism, housework, and sexual frequency in marriage. American Sociological Review, 78, 26–50. doi:10.1177/0003122412472340.

[ii] Mercer, C. A., Tanton, C., Prah, P., Erens, B., Sonnenberg, P, Clifton, S., … Johnson, A. M. (2013). Changes in sexual attitudes and lifestyles in Britain through the life course and over time: Findings from the National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles. The Lancet, 382, 1781–1794. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(13)62035-8.

Before you tell your intimate partners, “It’s not you, it’s me,” take a look at the media reactions to two new reports from the Council on Contemporary Families released this month, one on parenting the other on sex, and both relating to policy.

Journalists at several outlets including New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and AlterNet reported that there was a reason—that didn’t justify blaming parents—to explain the “happiness gap,” or the fact that parents in the United States, particularly when compared to parents in other countries, were less happy than non-parents. According to CCF expert Jennifer Glass, “The negative effects of parenthood on happiness were entirely explained by the presence or absence of social policies allowing parents to better combine paid work with family obligations. And this was true for both mothers and fathers. Countries with better family policy ‘packages’ had no happiness gap between parents and non-parents.” Boston Globe writer Duggan Arnette identified “paid sick and vacation leave, child care costs, and work schedule flexibility,” or lack thereof, as specific factors that were shown to influence the “happiness gap.”

Yet the happiness gap is not a universal problem, and some countries have addressed it. Quartz journalists Solana Pyne and Michael Tabb created a video that compares the United States to 22 other countries in terms of parent and non-parent happiness, as well as the availability of various kinds of social supports. The narrator says that “if you’re a working parent,” the reason for the happiness gap “is basically what you’d think.” The happiness gap will seem less inevitable, and its solutions more achievable, however, after seeing visuals comparing the presence of specific policies in countries in which parents are just as happy, if not happier than non-parents, with the absence of those policies in the United States, where the happiness gap is the largest.

What about romantic relationships? Emma Lousie-Pritchard of Cosmopolitan UK reported that, “To have more sex, couples have to agree to this one, brilliant rule.” That rule is dividing household work equally between men and women. CCF expert Sharon Sassler reported that couples in which men did between one-third and 65% of the housework tended to have more frequent sex. As personal as this sounds, though, there are still policy implications in that progressive work-family policies are a twofer: they are both family-friendly and promote equality in couples.

The notion of the policy twofer was made by Fusion’s Jennifer Gerson Uffalussy. She cited a Department of Labor report to connect Glass and colleagues’ findings on parental happiness with couples’ relationship satisfaction: “families with fathers who take more leave also share chores and childcare more equally between mothers and fathers. So paid leave and equitable paternity leave policies not only give dads the time to be parents, but cause a trickle-down effect of creating greater gender equity.”

Taking turns and “get[ting] out the toilet bleach and your sexiest pair of rubber gloves” might be good relationship advice, but improved work-family policies will make it easier for couples to do so equitably, and still have the time and money to spend with their children.

Read the full reports here:

“Parenting and Happiness in 22 Countries,” by Jennifer Glass, Robin Simon, and Matthew Andersson.

“A Reversal in Predictors of Sexual Frequency and Satisfaction in Marriage,” Sharon Sassler.

Most Americans agree that entrepreneurship is an important component of economic growth and job creation. Small businesses accounted for two million new jobs last year, and innovative start-ups like those in Silicon Valley are key contributors to our GDP.

But women are a vastly under-tapped resource when it comes to growing a vibrant economy. For instance, in 2014, woman-owned firms in the United States employed only six percent of the workforce and created less than four percent of all business revenues—a figure that is about the same as it was in 1997.Women are a vastly under-tapped resource when it comes to growing a vibrant economy.

In a recent analysis of survey data from 24 countries between 2001 and 2008, I find some surprising evidence about different kinds of gender gaps in entrepreneurial activity and the relationship between those gender gaps and government policies. It turns out that having more women entrepreneurs does not necessarily mean that more women are running large or lucrative types of enterprises. When it comes to entrepreneurial startups, in contrast to our experience with the benefits of having more women enter traditional workplaces, sometimes fewer ends up meaning better. more...

There are memes all over the internet proclaiming that men who do housework “get laid” more often. Google “men who do housework,” and you’ll find, “Porn for Women:” a calendar featuring shirtless men doing household chores. What’s so sexy about men doing housework? The underlying message winks at the fact that, in the US, women continue to do the bulk of household labor even though almost as many of them work for pay outside the home as do men. Even after more than a century of feminist movement, most heterosexual households are still organized along gender lines. Heterogendered tradition still valorizes (and separates) male breadwinners and female caregivers. In this context, men who relieve women of housework are seen as rare, exotic, and even “sexy.”

Of course, real housework isn’t sexy at all. Preparing meals, doing laundry, washing dishes, cleaning – these are tasks that never end. Another common internet meme asks, “Don’t you just love those 12 seconds when all the laundry is done?” We noticed that you could create a lively, acerbic Pinterest page just on gender and housework!

So what does it look like when “real men”—men who consider themselves breadwinners and heads of the household—do housework? Why would these men do housework in the first place? They might do it if they became unemployed. We interviewed 40 men who lost their jobs during the recent recession. Most (85%) of these men expressed traditional viewpoints about gender in the home, saying that men should provide for women and children. And yet, after losing work, most (85%) of these men became financially dependent on their wives or girlfriends. This caused an ideological as well as financial quandary for them. Because their beliefs about masculinity were tangled up with employment, they had to redefine manhood while they were unemployed.

So how did these men prove their manhood? They tackled housework, and they crushed it “like men.” Ben, who called himself, “Mr. Housework,” explained that he mopped, vacuumed, and steam cleaned the floors multiple times a week. Richard said, “I won’t even use a mop on a floor, just on my knees and stuff. I find it somewhat cathartic, believe it or not, but I roll the rugs up, the ones in the kitchen, shaking them outside, leaving them [to air] out.” Our subjects embraced housework to do their part in the family, and they redefined women’s work as hard work—work befitting men. As Brian said, “I would prefer to be working but I just have to step up and be a man in a different kind of manner.”

So it apparently takes a recession to blur the division of labor in traditional household. Will this blurriness last as the economy recovers and men go back to work? Maybe. If “heads of households” and “men’s men” see household labor as real work, this could elevate its worth in larger society, making it less surprising and funny when men and women cross gendered boundaries in their homes.

Kristen Myers is Professor of Sociology and Director of Center for the Study of Women, Gender, & Sexuality at Northern Illinois University. Ilana Demantas is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at University of Kansas. They write about their research in detail in “Being ‘The Man’ Without Having a Job And/Or: Providing Care Instead of ‘Bread’”—a chapter in Families as They Really Are.

It’s Almost Mothers’ Day: Why is pay for caregiving work so low relative to other jobs with similarly low requirements for formal education?

Two of the lowest paid groups of employees in the American economy are child care workers and personal care aides, according to a report just released by the US Census Bureau on February 25, 2016, providing the latest (2014) figures on how much men and women earn in each occupation.

Many of the organizations and political leaders honoring International Women’s Day last Tuesday have made a “pledge for parity,” promising to promote gender equity in pay. When most people think about what parity means, their “go to” question is whether men and women earn the same when they work in the same job and perform equally well. But we should also think about whether differences in pay between occupations are equitable. To keep the focus just on between-occupation differences, let me give some figures just for women.Soon it will be Mother’s Day, and we will be inundated with testimonials of appreciation for the devotion, skill, and hard work that women put in to caring for their own children.

Women who were child care workers in 2014 had median earnings of only $20,452 for the year. If we assume that means 50 weeks a year and 40 hours per week, those child care workers made just $10.22/hour. Personal care aides earned $21,459 a year. Many food service workers have similarly low salaries. more...

What’s going on in the South?  First a “religious discrimination” bill passed both houses in Georgia (not signed by the Governor), then North Carolina passes HB2 sold as a “bathroom bill” but allows discrimination against LGBTQ people all over the state. And now Mississippi passes a “religious freedom” bill that includes the right to discriminate not only against LGBTQ folks but also fornicators, those radical people who have sex outside the bonds of marriage (you know, the rest of us, at least sometime in our lives). Is there a contest for which Southern state can be most crazy?

North Carolina and Mississippi have suddenly become states to avoid if you care about human rights, if you are LGBTQ people, or if you know or love someone that is. Are there any Americans who shouldn’t be thinking of boycotting these states?

You might think that these new laws passed hurt transgender people only, but you’d be wrong.  These laws allow discrimination and legitimate harassment against anyone who doesn’t follow the typical expectations for how we look, or how we hold our bodies, or who we love, or who or whether we marry. These concerns about looks and bodies relate directly to what sociologists refer to as how we “do gender.” These laws try to impose one fixed and “normal” way to “do gender,” along with whom to partner and how.  But over the past 30 years that I have written about gender, I have seen dramatic changes to what is considered “normal” and whether sex outside of marriage is a crime or just another recreational activity that feels good. Many more people are open about their gender identities, and express them in a variety of ways. Our categories have changed and moved beyond a simple binary where “boys will be boys” and “girls will be girls.”

The dramatic change has been especially clear in research for my new book on Millennials. The changes in how people “do gender” pushed me to write a book I had never planned to write. Indeed, after teaching a graduate seminar where the students and I collected over a hundred life interviews from young adults, I was startled to see the dramatic diversity, and increasing confusion, around gender and sexuality among Millennials.

I talked to two groups of young people who will be much hurt by a law that allows anyone to police who can use what bathroom, or who can love whom and when. Transgender people of all ages will be hurt. In my research, every transgender respondent had stories about the trouble they had going to the bathroom, even in states without laws that require gender discrimination. One transman told me that he often leaves an event and  travels a long way home on public transportation before going to the bathroom. As he told me about life as a transman he said “I wait until we get home. We call it the trans bladder. We can wait for hours before going to the bathroom.” Think of the physical pain, holding back the release of urine and excrement to avoid being bullied. And now realize that the states of North Carolina and Mississippi have just more than legitimized such harassment, they have required it by law. What kind of rude culture legitimates bullying? Is this the new meaning of southern hospitality?

Another group of research respondents will also suffer and have thus far remained invisible in the conversation, young people who reject the binary rules of gender. In my interviews I met people who identify as genderqueer: they do not want to be the opposite gender. Instead, they reject the label given at birth entirely as they reject the categories male and female which are irrelevant to their identities… Most, but not all, of these genderqueer young people grew up girls. They are often mistaken for men, but many continue to identify their sex as female, and their gender as queer. They too report already being hassled in restrooms.  Many avoid bathrooms.  One genderqueer respondent told me that she often faces uncomfortable interactions. “Usually they look at me trying to figure out if I am a boy or a girl…they’re like ‘I can’t tell cause she’s got short hair and she wears boy’s clothes, but those lips look kinda feminine. I think she’s got tits under there.” Another person quoted RuPaul “you’re born naked and the rest is drag” as the basis for androgynous self-presentation consciously designed to be neither masculine or feminine.

RuPaul’s view of the world is good sociology. Gender identity is very powerful but how we use gender—dressing or carrying our bodies–to present how we identify ourselves is complicated, ever changing, and culturally specific.   How we choose whom to love, and whether or not they have similar genitals seems the most intimate of decisions, and not good fodder for public policy. It takes very intrusive big government to want to judge intimate relationships. To legitimate harassment of people because of their gender expression hurts not only transgender and genderqueer people, it hurts us all. To legitimate harassment and discrimination on who you love, and whether or not that love is legally sanctioned by a marriage certificate, is not religious, it is hateful. Why should any couple be subject to questioning about their marital status? Why should anyone have to dress conservatively enough to assure vigilante enforcers that they are indeed male or female? How feminine must I dress to look like a woman?

As President of the Southern Sociological Society, and a woman who raised her child in North Carolina, I am proud that my professional association has voted not to meet in any state that discriminates against any of our members. I hope many more businesses and organizations join the boycott. If anyone is at risk for discrimination, we all are.

Barbara J Risman is currently a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at CASBS. She is a Senior Scholar at the Council on Contemporary Family and  is on-leave from  University of Illinois at Chicago.

Another Quarter Century of Family Change and Diversity

Editor’s note: In 1992—the year the U.S. presidential campaign erupted into a culture war over family values—Stephanie Coontz published The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. The title itself offered the pithy concept, and the book demonstrated that diversity and change have always been hallmarks of American family life: “Leave It to Beaver” was not a documentary. This week (March 29, 2016) Coontz released a substantially revised and updated edition of The Way We Never Were. Below, she provides a brief review of ten things that have changed for the better in the past quarter century, three that have stayed the same, and two that have gotten worse.

In 1992, political leaders and pundits were predicting that changes in family forms and gender roles were leading America into disaster. Were they right? 

1. Whatever happened to the Super Predators? In the early 1990s criminologists were predicting “a blood bath of violence” unleashed by “tens of thousands of severely morally impoverished juvenile super-predators” – all supposedly a result of rising rates of unwed births. But between 1993 and 2010, sexual assaults and intimate partner violence reported dropped by more than 60 percent. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics, the murder rate in 2013 was lower than at any time since the records began in 1960. Since 1994, juvenile crime rates have plummeted by more than 60 percent, even though the proportion of children born out of wedlock has risen to 40 percent.

2. How about crack babies? In the 1980s and 1990s, newspapers headlined an epidemic of “crack babies” in the inner city, with kids permanently damaged by their mothers’ use of crack cocaine during pregnancy. This led to a wave of punitive legal actions against such women. But follow-up studies have since revealed that children from the same high-poverty areas who had not been exposed to cocaine in utero were equally likely to have developmental and intellectual delays as babies born with cocaine in their systems. As I documented in The Way We Never Were, the big risk to these children was the pollution, violence, and chronic stress of deeply impoverished and neglected communities – including lead poisoning damage that was going on for years before it hit the headlines in 2016 because of the disaster in Flint.

3. Did career women start “out-sourcing” their children’s developmental care? As women gained more high prestige jobs in the late 1990s, that’s what many experts feared. In fact, however, even as mothers’ work hours increased, their child-care hours increased too, while fathers’ child-care time tripled. Today, both single and working moms spend more time with their children than married homemaker mothers did back in 1965.

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TSP readers likely appreciate Philip Cohen for his provocative blog, Family Inequality, which—based on a look at who retweets him—regularly has material valued by undergraduates, senior scholars, data nerds, policy wonks, and journalists alike. Cohen is a Council on Contemporary Families senior scholar and a professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. His research focuses on the sociology of families, social demography, and social inequality. His family textbook, The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change, was published in 2014. Cohen gave me these useful answers to my “3q”:

Q: First, a challenge: What’s one single thing you “know” with certainty, after years of research into modern families?

PC: Family inequality is remarkably resilient, but when it changes it does so under the influence of external forces. When women’s opportunities increase (or men’s decrease), when public investment in education increases, when the legal environment changes when technology permits reductions in household labor, when policies lighten (or compensate) the load of caring labor — that’s when inequality within families shifts. There is a dialectic here, and micro-level interactions within families matter, but these external forces are in the historical driver’s seat.

Q: Give us the “Twitter” version of your current research—in 140 characters (give or take), what are you working on now?

PC: This is what I’m working on today, in 140 characters: The culture wars over family politics always return to gender difference itself; it’s what’s at stake when left & right fight over families.

Q: How would you encourage a scholar of family life to work to get their research into public life, affecting policy and challenging assumptions about “average families”?

PC: The public loves to argue about families. There are lots of opportunities to get your work out there and make it relevant. Unlike some areas of sociological research, if you’re working on families, almost everything has a potential angle — in fact, one of the challenges is to not oversell the implications of our research. There is also a lot of translational work to do — interpreting and explaining new data and research as it comes out, helping people figure out what to make of the latest findings in the context of what we already know rather than participating in the whipsaw advice machine that thrives on contradicting conventional wisdom. I recommend that junior scholars get involved with the Council on Contemporary Families, which helps organize and transmit new research responsibly and effectively, and to look for opportunities to publish popular pieces in online venues that encourage well-reasoned and empirically-grounding discussion and debate.

Reprinted from Chicago Tribune.  

Feminists my age and older — I’m in my late 50s — have been shocked to find how few young women are as excited as most of us by the prospect of having a female president. We grew up in a world where there were no powerful female role models — in politics, business or even in the movies — and where we were sternly warned against entertaining any aspirations of our own. We were expected to find our sense of achievement and meaning in the accomplishments of our future husbands and sons. Betty Friedan famously described how “the feminine mystique” forced women and girls of that era to conform to stifling stereotypes that caused long-term damage to their self-esteem and happiness. What a thrill it is, for many of us, regardless of our personal politics, to see a woman so close to smashing the stereotypes that held us back for so long. And why, we wonder, can’t young women see what it would mean for women everywhere to have such a role model?

But maybe at this moment in history we are looking to the wrong sex to find people who feel the anguish that gender stereotypes can cause. At this moment, could boys need gender equality even more than girls?

It’s no accident that the older women berating millennials’ supposed lack of feminism are in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. These women grew up in an era when gender stereotyping was so pervasive it organized the course of every woman’s life, whatever her class, race, education or politics. Being a woman colored every aspect of life, and every choice to be anything more than a wife required us to defy powerful social norms. During the consciousness-raising meetings of the 1970s and 1980s, almost every young woman had a story about the pain she had felt when told that she wasn’t “being a lady” or worse still, was “acting like a man.”

That’s changed for young women. In my interviews with millennials for a forthcoming book, I found that it was the young men, not the young women, who told painful stories about their experiences with gender stereotyping. Feminism has so changed the world that young women no longer feel constrained in their girlhood even during their transition to adulthood. Research suggests gender consciousness will develop later of course, as women face the motherhood penalty at work and the growing pay gap with men as they age. But right now, everyone tells them “you go, girl.”

But if gender is invisible to most girls transitioning to adulthood, it is all too real to the boys who still get bullied for not “being a man” or for “acting like a girl.” I heard stories that turn my stomach about young men being teased for wanting to take a ballet class, or ridiculed in their adolescence because they’d rather hang in the kitchen with their sisters than play football with the guys in the family. Girls are increasingly allowed the freedom to be anything they want to be, but boys are still pressured to “man up.” As Stephanie Coontz, a historian and director of research for the Council on Contemporary Families, suggests, “Gender stereotyping of women is still real, but it tends to kick in after a woman leaves school and starts trying to combine her personal life and work life. It’s OK now for a girl to be a tomboy or an athlete or a great student. But the gender-typing of boys kicks in very young, and the penalties for gender-nonconformity are harsh.”

At this point in millennials’ lives, in this feminist-influenced you-go-girl world, young women understand gender to be a personal attribute, not a socially imposed identity. Why would they support a woman for president because she shared their sex category? The millennial women in my sample mostly claim never to have experienced sexism, and even if they may in the future, that’s not going to affect their votes now.

Perhaps a candidate who wants to open up opportunities that are limited because of sex should start talking to male millennials who increasingly express discontent with the pressures to be the primary breadwinner and not to take time off at work when they have a new baby at home or need to be available to help their mother die in her own home, with dignity. Young women feel they have the option to have a full-time career but also to cut back if they feel the need (at least if they are married to partners with incomes) but men do not. Men are beginning to resent the freedom women have for “choices” when they have none.

Perhaps Hillary Clinton should explain to young men how much better off they would be if they had a female president who appreciates their desire for a more balanced life than the masculine mystique allows. They may now be more ready to listen than are the young women who still labor under the illusion that they can have it all without men’s lives changing.

Barbara J. Risman, a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is on sabbatical at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She is also a senior scholar at the Council on Contemporary Families.