Young Conservative Men and Women Have Very Different Ideas of Success. I Think I Know What’s Going On.

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An NBC News Decision Desk poll^[2] of Gen Z adults this week confirmed what many culture-watchers across the political spectrum have long argued: Young men and women are not aligned when it comes to life goals, especially when you compare right-wing men to left-wing women. But when you look closer, the poll actually suggests that it’s young conservatives, not liberals, for whom life expectations more dramatically diverge in terms of gender lines. Young liberal women and young liberal men share a broader worldview about what a successful life looks like. Young conservatives do not—especially when it comes to prioritizing marriage and children. Donald Trump’s working-class base already struggles^[3] with familial stability. The gaps between what conservative young men think offers them social status versus what conservative young women prioritize seems primed to only exacerbate existing frictions, and may mean that these young people don’t wind up with the families they say are so important.

According to the poll^[4], Gen Z adults—those ages 18 to 29—have pretty divergent views on what a successful life looks like. Among young men who voted for Donald Trump, “having children” tops the list of personal successes. Among young women who voted for Kamala Harris, having children is ranked 12 out of 13 possible choices, just above “fame and influence” and just below “being married.” Young women were more likely to select everything from career happiness to being spiritually grounded as more important for a successful life. And it is indeed telling that there is such a stark divide between the genders, one that grows starker still with political affiliation.

What was most striking to me, though, wasn’t just the political gender divide, but how much more united liberal young people were than conservative ones. While a majority of Harris voters, male and female alike, agreed that having a fulfilling job or career was key to a successful life, there was no single marker of adulthood that a majority of young Trump voters said was important to life success. Conservative Gen Zers, it seems, don’t have a unified vision of what a successful life is—and the real outliers are conservative men.

It’s important to understand how this poll works before reading too much into the responses, because it’s a bit of a funny one. Respondents were asked what makes for a successful life, then given 13 possible answers, among which they could choose only three. And the question wasn’t about what any respondent wants in their own life; it was “Which of the following is important to your personal definition of success?” Many respondents, in other words, may very well want things like children and marriage, may think marriage or children are components of a good life, or may already have children or be married—they just don’t rank those things in their top three picks for defining what “success” looks like.

While other polls^[9] have found that, among young adults without children, men are significantly more likely than women to want children in the future, only about 1 in 5 young women say they don’t want children at all; nearly half do, and close to a third just aren’t sure. Given that the average American mother has her first child in her late 20s^[10], we can also assume that a great many Gen Z women already have kids, they just may not equate motherhood with success. And it’s not like young men want a giant brood and women want to stay childless: American adults under 40 say they plan to have^[11] about two children, a number that is the same for women and men alike.

All of this makes the fact that more conservative men chose “having children” as personally definitional to success much more telling. For women regardless of politics, and for liberal men, it seems that children and marriage may be components of a good life, but they aren’t considered some sort of accomplishment. For conservative men, they are. Perhaps the big divide here isn’t about what one wants one’s family to look like, but in how one conceives of parenthood in the first place. For Trump-voting men, having kids may be a kind of flex, a status symbol, a feather in their cap—and, conveniently, something for which women actually take on the lion’s share of the labor.

Conservative women are far less likely than conservative men to define personal success according to childbearing, although they are much more likely to do so than liberal women or men. Twenty-six percent of Trump-voting women listed^[12] “having children” as one of their three markers of success; only 6 percent^[13] of Harris-voting women and 9 percent of Harris-voting men said the same. But with 34 percent of Trump-voting young men saying children are definitional to success, the gap between right-wing women and right-wing men is particularly wide. And between right-wing men and left-wing women, it’s enormous.

This does not bode well for conservative parental happiness, and bodes really poorly for any young liberal women who make the mistake of marrying Trump-voting men. Among the ranks of Gen Z Republicans, men already outnumber women by nearly 2 to 1^[14], the widest partisan gap of any age cohort. The conservative Gen Z men who want marriage and children already have a smaller pool of young women to date, given the dearth of young right-wing women and the fact that many liberal women understandably don’t want to wind up with men who don’t believe they should have the right to their own bodies^[15] and may not support their careers or personal independence. And even conservative women may not want to pair up with men who pollsters have found to be startlingly misogynist and who don’t seem particularly inclined to course-correct on the very sexist ideas that put so many young women off. A 2024 YouGov poll^[16] found that just one-third of Gen Z men agreed that “Things would be better if women held more powerful positions in society and men did more around the house.” A previous NBC poll^[17] found that while 58 percent of Gen Z women strongly disagreed that women taking on traditional roles would make America a stronger nation, just a third of Gen Z men said the same.

Young liberals are far less divided, with men and women alike agreeing that things like career meaning and financial well-being are important for success. A majority^[18] of both male and female Harris voters selected having a fulfilling job or career as one of their three choices for defining success. Forty-six percent of female Harris voters and 42 percent of male ones selected “having money to do things you want.” Well over a third of male and female Harris voters agreed that “using talents and resources to help others” is part of a successful life; 39 percent of female Harris voters also listed “having emotional stability.”

The top five most-selected answers were the same among male and female Harris voters; the only difference was that “emotional stability” ranked above “using talents and resources to help others” for Harris-voting women, while the reverse was true for Harris-voting men. But otherwise, young liberals are surprisingly aligned in how they define success: It means a meaningful career, financial stability, doing good in the world, and emotional maturity.

Not so among young conservatives. While 34 percent of Trump-voting young men picked having children as definitional for success, no other answer was selected by more than a third of them. Among Trump-voting young women, 40 percent selected “financial independence” as important to their definition of success, but the next most popular choice—having a fulfilling job or career—was chosen by just 32 percent. Conservatives of both sexes were simply less unified in a personal definition of success. For conservative men, success requires children, marriage, financial independence, and a meaningful career. For conservative women, career and financial independence made the top five, but they put home ownership and spiritual grounding above marriage and children.

In other words, conservative men prioritize procreation, while conservative women prioritize professional and financial stability—and that professional and financial stability may very well be compromised if they procreate with conservative men.

Right now, young conservative men are being fed a steady stream of misogyny online, whether by virulent woman-haters like influencer and accused rapist^[19] Andrew Tate or by “tradwife” social media accounts featuring hot young women raising large broods, content that is ostensibly targeted at women but actually seems to be mostly consumed by men^[20] who fetishize female submission. The Tates and the Trads are not necessarily the same men, with the Tates emphasizing male promiscuity and the Trads encouraging a more traditional kind of married patriarchy. Both, though, feed into a fantasy of male entitlement with few attendant obligations. Neither offers a model of masculinity that might appeal to the young women who say they want meaningful work and financial independence, even as they might also want marriage and children.

This is a problem for the young women, conservative and liberal alike, who say they want meaningful jobs and financial independence. An unsupportive partner can sabotage^[22] a woman’s career, and a man who believes that it’s a woman’s job to take care of the children and the household is a man who is not going to do his fair share of those tasks. These at-home demands are the primary reason women drop out of the workforce^[23] and become financially dependent on men. And when mothers leave the workforce to stay home full time, they wind up hugely^[24] vulnerable: There are not just lost wages that can extend into the hundreds of thousands of dollars^[25], but a permanent loss of lifetime earnings and wage growth, less saved for retirement, lower Social Security payments, a more difficult time finding a job in ones 40s or 50s after years out of the workforce, and susceptibility to financial abuse and control, not to mention the lower rates^[26] of health and happiness seen in stay-at-home moms. There are few decisions more important than who you have a child with, and ambitious women who have children with unhelpful men are primed for some serious misery.

Conservative Republicans have long believed^[27] that women are simply better suited to child-rearing than men, and it doesn’t seem like young conservative men are much more progressive on this than their fathers, even while young women^[28] have shifted left. Young conservatives, then, are entering the romantic marketplace with wildly different expectations about their own roles and obligations, and what one owes a partner and partnership. And it seems clear that, as a result, many men won’t get what they want and will end up resentful over it, while women may simply go their own way. Marriage and childbearing have largely been decoupled among the more-conservative working class^[29], a demographic that Trump dominates. Most mothers without a college degree are not married when they have children; by contrast, huge majorities of mothers with college degrees are married^[30].

Not that these young pro-Trump men may notice or care: Fewer than 1 in 10 said^[31] “having emotional stability” was important to a successful life, compared to nearly 40 percent of women who voted for Harris. (One has to wonder if these Trumpian men would find more procreative success if they prioritized emotional stability, something any sane woman certainly requires in a partner.)

That these gendered and politicized expectation gaps around parenthood morph into gendered and politicized gaps in the act of parenting itself is borne out in other data. College-educated fathers—a group that trends more liberal^[36] than their non-college counterparts—spend almost twice as much time with their children^[37] than those without a college degree. They spend an average of 3.7 hours per week on necessary caregiving, like changing diapers; dads without a college degree do just 1.9 hours per week of that kind of nonnegotiable labor. College-educated fathers are more likely to be married. While just 10 percent of dads with a college degree live apart from their children, 27 percent of dads without a degree do. More than half of these dads who don’t live with their kids don’t see them regularly—although, again, even among the dads who don’t share a home with their kids, college-educated ones are more involved and see their children more often.

None of this seems like a coincidence. There is much that pro-marriage and natalist conservatives can learn from how Zoomers define success—but the lesson is decidedly not that young women don’t care about children or family. It’s that conservative men are getting in the way of their own familial aspirations by seeing children as an achievement and then not actually doing the work to care for them—and not always doing the work to support their female partners’ ambitions. The tough truth for pro-family conservatives is that if they want stronger families, they need more young men to reject Trumpian misogyny, embrace the tenets of modern egalitarian feminism, and see having children not as an achievement that ends at ejaculation but as a lifelong relationship in which they have as much stake—and as much obligation—as women.

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