Young Americans are massively divided by gender and political affiliation on the question of whether it’s important have children, a new poll has found.
According to new research by NBC News and SurveyMonkey, women aged 18 to 29 who voted for Kamala Harris last year ranked “having children” 12th out of 13 in their “personal definition of success”, with young male Harris voters putting it 10th.
But young women Trump voters ranked it 6th out of 13 and young men who voted for Trump said it was their single highest priority.
Enthusiasm for “being married” was similarly divided, with Trump-voting young men ranking it fourth and Democrat-voting young women ranking it 11th. Interestingly, both male Harris voters and female Trump voters ranked being married identically at 9th.
That poll, conducted between August 13 and September 1, was among numerous reports, surveys, and studies that indicate a growing political divide between men and women in rich economies across the world.
The gap is so stark that an analysis of global survey data by the Financial Times last year declared that Generation Z is really “two generations, not one”.
NBC’s poll found that while 18-29 year olds as a whole disapproved of Trump’s job performance by 64 percent to 36 percent on average, the gap among men was only six percentage points compared to 48 points for women.
Polling by the Pew Research Center in 2024 likewise found that childless men aged 18 to 34 were far more likely to want children compared to women in the same age bracket, with 57 percent compared to 45 percent.
An Independent analysis of 2024 presidential exit polls further found that a modest rightward shift among U.S. men helped deliver victory for Trump, with the contrast sharpest among Latino men.
A growing share of adults under 50 say they’re unlikely to ever have children, citing reasons such as “concerns about the state of the world”, “can’t afford to raise the child”, and “just don’t want to”.
The U.S. fertility rate has fallen to around 1.6 children per woman as of 2023, which is far below the 2.1 births necessary to maintain the country’s current population — part of a global plunge in birth rates that has some experts worried.
It will take decades for lower birth rates to translate to shrinking populations and high rates of immigration could counteract the drop. But the trend could wreak havoc on a global economy built on the assumption of continual growth.
The Trump administration and its allies have repeatedly said they want to spark a new baby boom, with vice president J.D. Vance describing low fertility as a “civilizational crisis” driven by “cat ladies” on the “childless left”.
As well as drastically limiting abortion rights, Republicans have mooted prioritizing infrastructure projects in areas with higher birth rates, offering new mothers a $5,000 “baby bonus”, and promoting marriage while cracking down on “free love”, “pornography”, “same-sex relations”, and birth control.
NBC’s poll found that the political gender gap was particularly wide on particular issues. Men’s approval for Trump was 20 points higher than women’s on the subject of inflation and living costs; 20 points higher on tariffs and foreign trade; and 24 points higher on immigration and deportation.
Around 66 percent of women said they were “anxious or worried about the future” most or almost al of the time, compared to only 46 percent of men.
The country’s two most popular genders were also divided on whether women still suffer from sexism in the workplace (44 percent for women versus 27 percent for men).
