A global survey reveals that Generation Z males hold more traditional views on gender than their grandfathers. The numbers are hard to argue with. The implications are harder to explain.
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You can simply scroll past — but please don’t overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
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The boy is perhaps nineteen, seated in a lecture hall in an Austrian university. It is a critical thinking seminar, and the question on the table is whether a wife should obey her husband. He does not hesitate. He answers yes with the confidence of someone who has never examined the load-bearing walls of his own assumptions. His tutor — a British woman in her fifties — pauses. She has heard this before. What surprises her is the frequency: how often, in the last five years, the young men in her international classroom have begun sounding like the grandfathers whose world they were supposed to have outgrown.
The numbers gave the anecdote a statistical skeleton. A 29-country survey of 23,000 people conducted by Ipsos and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London found that almost a third of Generation Z males (born 1997–2012) believe a wife should obey her husband; among baby boomers (born 1946–1964), the figure is 13 per cent. Among women, the gap persists: 18 per cent of Gen Z, 6 per cent of boomers. A third of Gen Z males said a husband should have the final word on household decisions; almost a quarter believe women should not appear too self-sufficient. Twenty-one per cent said a ‘real woman’ should never initiate sex, three times the boomer figure, and the same proportion believed men who participated in caregiving were less masculine. People in Indonesia (66 per cent) and Malaysia (60 per cent) were most likely to endorse wifely obedience, compared with 23 per cent in the United States and 13 per cent in Great Britain. The reversal — younger men more traditional than older — held across all 29 countries.
There is a contradiction lodged in the data. Gen Z males were the group most likely to find successful women attractive (41 per cent) and the most likely to insist that those women should not appear too independent. The successful woman is admired, provided her success does not unsettle the household pecking order. Wanting a woman who succeeds and defers at the same time does not appear to register as a problem.
Professor Heejung Chung, lead researcher on the study, offered a structural explanation. ‘I think there are a lot of grievances, a lot of fear of men losing social positions,’ she said. ‘And there’s a vacuum that’s being filled with rhetoric and voices which are trying to pitch young men against gender equality, against young women, against migrants.’ In previous generations, men could perform masculinity through breadwinning; increasingly, those opportunities are not as easy. The broader data confirms the drift. In 2019, 42 per cent globally said women’s rights had gone far enough; by 2026, the figure was 52 per cent. More than half of Gen Z males (59 per cent) said men were expected to do too much for equality. Thirty per cent believed men should not say ‘I love you’ to their friends, against 20 per cent of boomers. Their grandfathers, who lived under far stricter social codes, were apparently less anxious about policing their own warmth.
Julia Gillard, former Australian prime minister and chair of the Global Institute, said the concern went beyond women. ‘Not only are many Gen Z men putting limiting expectations on women, but they are also trapping themselves within restrictive gender norms,’ she said. ‘We must continue to do more to dispel the idea of a zero-sum game in which women are the only beneficiaries of a gender-equal world.’ The zero-sum framing may say more about the survey’s respondents than any individual statistic. The young men filling in the ledger seem convinced that what women have gained, they personally have lost.
The temptation is to treat these findings as a purely heterosexual phenomenon. They are not. Gender hierarchy can persist without heterosexuality. The sociologist Raewyn Connell, whose concept of hegemonic masculinity (in lesbian couples as well or even more) has shaped four decades of scholarship, showed that masculinities are arranged in a hierarchy among gay men and women themselves, with femininity functioning as a disciplinary tool regardless of whom one sleeps with. Among gay men, the phenomenon is visible in the currency of ‘masc4masc’ preferences on dating platforms, where femininity in men is treated as disqualifying. What is being enforced has less to do with heterosexuality than with a grammar of rank that predates any particular sexual orientation.
A substantial body of queer-studies research has examined how lesbian couples sometimes reproduce hierarchical roles resembling those of heterosexual marriage. Kennedy and Davis documented this in Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold; Carla Pfeffer’s Queering Families (Oxford University Press, 2017) has shown the pattern enduring in trans and queer partnerships. Mimicry is the wrong word for it. The same structural pressures shape all intimate life: economic dependency, unequal care work, a world that rewards gendered complementarity. Young people of all orientations, facing precarity and uncertainty about who they are supposed to be, reach for simplified hierarchies because those hierarchies come ready-made. Nobody has to design them from scratch.
The survey revealed one further dissonance. In Britain, only 14 per cent personally believed women should take on most childcare responsibility. But 43 per cent said society expected women to do so. People are acting according to what they think everyone else believes, performing convictions they may not hold. The traditionalist turn among young men may owe less to deep feeling than to this kind of social theatre, and nobody in the audience is checking whether the actors believe their own lines.
Back in the lecture hall, the seminar moves on. The young man who answered so readily does not appear bothered by his own certainty, which may be the most disquieting part: he holds these views lightly, as if obedience were a lifestyle preference and hierarchy a matter of taste. The question that lingers is not really what these young men believe. It is what they imagine belief costs them. So far, the answer appears to be: nothing much at all.
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