• New research has revealed that female high school seniors are expressing dramatically less interest in getting married.
  • The findings were reported by the Pew Research Center, which analyzed a study from the University of Michigan.
  • Now, people online are debating what the root cause of the downturn could be.

The whole marriage-and-2.5-children fantasy is less popular than ever—particularly among teenage girls. Last week, the Pew Research Center released an analysis of data from the University of Michigan, which says that the percentage of female high school seniors who plan to one day get married has significantly dipped over the past 30 years.

In 1993, 83% of girls surveyed said they saw marriage in their future, notably higher than the 76% of boys who felt the same. But over the past three decades, while the percentage of young men who say they plan to get married has barely changed (it now sits just two points lower at 74%), the attitude shift among young women has been far more dramatic. Now, only 61% say they intend to be married one day.

One reason for this decline is a dwindling amount of certainty in young women's responses. 31% of the girls surveyed responded that they "don't know" whether they one day want to be married, in comparison to 30 years ago, when only 12% were similarly unsure.

What sets this study apart from the many other reports that paint Gen Z as largely anti-marriage is the gender gap in the results. The difference between how young men and young women responded is stark, and has been the main point of discussion about the research online. Commenters have expectedly resorted to playing the blame game to identify the root cause of this ideological gap.

One oft-mentioned explanation for the decline is the fact that adult women today are, by and large, more autonomous, educated, and employed than they were three decades ago. So there's less pressure and/or incentive to get married for the sake of gaining financial security. But many online also pose a more timely theory: the reason girls aren’t dreaming of marriage is because they’re socializing with young men who constantly consume digital content engineered to make them resent women. In the past decade, an online ecosystem of misogynistic websites, podcasts, and forums—otherwise known as the manosphere—has emerged, and maintained a steady grip on impressionable young Gen Z men. This year, the Movember Institute of Men’s Health reported that almost two-thirds of men aged 16 to 25 regularly engage with “masculinity influencers,” and that that group was reportedly more likely to have “negative and limiting attitudes towards women and their roles in relationships.”

The girls who took part in the recent University of Michigan study spent their formative years alongside male counterparts who’ve become the target audience for the provocative, anti-feminist hate speech that prevails in dark corners of the internet. Hence why many reactions to this study name prominent manosphere figures like Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes as the potential reason why young women may have a harder time envisioning a future with the young men they interact with on a daily basis.

No matter the primary cause, this research indicates that we’re far from the days in when marriage was accepted as the ultimate measure of success for women. Yet young men are still idealizing about it at nearly the same rate they were 30 years ago. In the years to come, the 17 to 18-year-old subjects of this study will likely reevaluate their stance on this matter time and time again. But it’s significant that at this pivotal age, almost 40% of girls on the precipice of adulthood, who are weighing their higher education options and plotting out career paths, have decided that their ideal future doesn’t include a legal life partner. The focus of young girls’ dreams has dramatically shifted.