By the time most women are old enough to have children, they’ve been subjected to a litany of pressure around their fertility – which vitamins and supplements to take, whether to put career or family first, when/if to freeze their eggs, and on and on. In reality, though, recent research has shown that male factors (like the volume, speed, or shape of sperm) contribute to infertility around 50 percent of the time.
At Cosmopolitan, we wanted to know whether this new science was impacting the way heterosexual couples navigate getting pregnant, so we asked more than 400 people (specifically, men and women between the ages of 20 and 49) how – or even if – they think about getting pregnant and what they have and haven’t done about it. We found that while women are still more likely to plan and feel responsible for fertility (and more likely to feel burdened by that responsibility), across generations and genders, most people recognise that fertility is a shared, equivalent responsibility of both male and female partners.
Gen Z understands this better than older generations: 70% of respondents in their twenties believe fertility is the responsibility of male and female partners equally—compared with 56% of millennials and Gen Xers. And Gen Z women who want kids but don’t have them are much less likely than older generations to feel internalised pressure around their fertility. (For men who want kids but don’t have them, the amount who feel internalised pressure is pretty much the same across generations.)
The Infertility Trap
While family, society, and friends still make young women feel disproportionately responsible for pregnancy outcomes, Gen Z men feel the pressure, too. Except in this case, the call is coming from inside the house.
Gen Z men who want kids but don’t yet have them are twice as likely as older men to feel pressure from their partners and almost twice as likely as their female counterparts to feel pressure from themselves. They’re also just as likely as young women who want kids to have spoken to a health professional about their plans.
There’s still a long way to go until men and women tackle their infertility with equal amounts of preparation and expectation.
Everyone's clicking on...
Young women who want kids but don’t yet have them still think more about their fertility, feel more burdened by the responsibility, and are more likely to have talked to doctors about it. But they are also putting way less pressure on themselves than older generations of women do (only 20% feel internalised pressure compared with 73% of older generations).
It’s heartening to see that as time moves on, people are doing more to share this sense of obligation. Let’s hope that as they age – and as fertility has an even greater impact on their lives – it stays that way.
Nicole Pasulka is Cosmopolitan’s senior features editor. She's written about gender, activism, and criminal justice for New York magazine, Harper’s, Mother Jones, VICE, The Believer, and more. Her writing has been anthologized in the Best American series and featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. Her first book, How You Get Famous: Ten Years of Drag Madness in Brooklyn, about NYC’s drag scene, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2022 and hailed by the New York Times as “the story of America now.
