For years now, falling birth rates have been a subject of alarm, with most of that discussion focused on women — the factors preventing them from having kids, whether mothers can balance work and family, if feminism has led women astray.
But what about men and what they think?
Demographers focused on fertility trends have largely ignored men’s attitudes toward gender, caregiving, and relationships. We have far less data on men’s perspectives than women’s and even less on how those viewpoints shape outcomes.
But, men do have opinions on these topics, even if we haven’t examined them all that closely. American men are more likely to see falling birth rates as a problem, for example, and also more likely to want a return to “traditional gender roles.” Nearly six in 10 men favor such a return, according to recent polling from the 19th News, compared to just four in 10 women. Among Republican men, that figure stood at 87 percent.
These attitudes aren’t just showing up in polls — they’re shaping policy and discourse. A growing number of conservatives have started to publicly lament that women’s equality may have been a bridge too far, with some calling for an end to no-fault divorce or suggesting it’s time to get rid of women’s right to vote. Even the New York Times, a mainstream and liberal publication, recently ran a segment titled, “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” discussing whether women have made professional culture too emotional and unserious.
It’s easy to feel like men and masculinity have gotten plenty of attention already, and there has certainly been reticence on the left to centering men’s desires at all. It’s not hard to understand these reservations. Men have been prioritized for most of human history, and still dominate positions of power.
But, understanding men’s attitudes remains essential. Everyone wants identity and purpose. For many men, these basic needs can manifest through a desire to feel masculine, and so their attitudes toward gender and caregiving are shaped by these deeper beliefs about what it means to be a man. If caregiving is seen as overly feminine work that diminishes masculinity, men will resist it.
For anyone who cares about gender equality, about women being able to find partners they want, or about people who want families being able to build them, ignoring what men think and need guarantees failure on every front.
It’s not just about chores
When it comes to gender equality and babies, activists and politicians have long argued that more of the first would lead to more of the second. Or, as a former Tory minister in the United Kingdom once quipped, “Feminism is the new natalism.” The optimistic theory was that, if men stepped up, and egalitarian policies like paid leave became more widespread, birth rates would rise.
There’s some truth to this, in the sense that research suggests a lack of gender equality makes the birth rate fall even faster.
Today, women with economic independence and less social pressure to marry are more likely to remain single than to settle for partners they don’t trust to be supportive. “It used to be that women felt like they had no other choice — like maybe this guy’s not great but he’s the best that’s going to come along,” said Patrick Brown, a family policy analyst at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center. “But now…women are willing to stay single if they don’t meet somebody who matches their criteria.”
And since most people who have kids these days do so in long-term, committed relationships, men who fail to demonstrate they’d be good partners face lower odds having kids at all.
Telling women to stay home isn’t a guarantee they’ll have more kids, either. Across most countries, women who work “are more likely to have children than those not employed,” said Trude Lappegård, a sociologist at the University of Oslo. This is true even when their partners are also employed.
In South Korea and Japan, where women are expected to do nearly all the domestic labor and must navigate workplaces that heavily penalize motherhood, fertility rates have imploded. South Korea’s birth rate hit 0.75 children per woman in 2024, the lowest in the world, while Japan’s dropped to 1.15. A similar trend exists across Southern Europe. In Italy, Spain, and Greece, where traditional gender norms remain strong, fertility has sunk to between 1.1 and 1.3.
These patterns show up in broader data, as well. A 2025 study analyzing over 40 European countries found that women increasingly want men to share child care and housework equally, while men’s beliefs that women should handle the unpaid, domestic work have remained largely unchanged. In countries where this gap was widest, both birth rates and female employment were lower — suggesting that men’s resistance to sharing chores may be holding both back.
“Of course this is not the only explanation — there are many factors that affect fertility — but we’re saying not having men recognizing their share in the household does have an impact on women choosing to have children or not,” study co-author Giulia Briselli told me.
The equation isn’t as simple as men doing more at home and birth rates going up. Men have clearly increased their time doing child care and domestic chores compared to generations past while fertility has continued to drop. “Pressuring men to help out more at home won’t help fertility,” Lyman Stone, a conservative demographer at the Institute for Family Studies, argued this summer.
Still, it’s more nuanced than that. Nordic countries that restructured parental leave, provided free child care, and created more flexible workplace norms that pull men into caregiving have higher fertility. Their rates hover around 1.4 to 1.6 — still well below replacement, but better. In Norway, Iceland, and Sweden, fathers who used their countries’ parental leave policies were more likely to have partners who welcomed a second child. Gender equality isn’t a magic fix, but doubling down on traditional roles seems to make things worse, not better.
Indeed, Briselli’s work found that, in countries where the gap between men’s and women’s attitudes about sharing child care and housework was smallest, both fertility rates and female employment were higher. What seems to matter most may not be hours logged on chores but whether women perceive the arrangement as fair. And, even Stone’s own data showed that when women’s sense of unfairness increases, fertility falls. It’s not just what men do at home, but whether they see it as their responsibility or as a favor.
This very question — of how men feel toward their obligations at home — is not well-studied. “This part was definitely not well-documented, not much attention has been paid to it, and I think we should put more light on it, for sure,” Briselli said.
Lappegård, the sociologist in Oslo, agreed and told me there’s been a general lack of interest in studying men among demographers in her field. “I’ve been screaming that we need more research about men for the last 20 years,” she told me. “If we want to really understand what’s going on with women then we not only have to compare them with men, but also men have their own independent voice in this.”
This knowledge gap exists partly because many scholars have seen the study of men and masculinity as inherently conservative — a pretext to rolling back women’s rights or centering men’s wounded feelings over women’s material concerns.
But, if we want to understand why men’s attitudes toward sharing domestic work have stagnated even as women’s expectations have shifted, then we’ll need to delve deeper into questions about how men see their place in the world. And if we want to ultimately move towards more equality and connection, then the question of what masculinity can and should be isn’t one we can avoid.
As concern about the mental health of men has grown, so has a debate about whether masculinity can be salvaged or if it’s fundamentally oppressive. Some argue for redefining it in more humane terms, so that engaged fathers and emotionally available partners are considered masculine; others push back hard. The idea that a more positive masculinity could even exist is “an attempt to scrub away the humiliating stain of womanhood from any trait or behavior before letting boys anywhere near it,” argued Ruth Whippman in the New York Times.
Doing so, echoed Jessica Winter in a recent New Yorker piece, would be conceding that “men should still rank above women in the social hierarchy, just not as much as before.” Both women propose a world where we scrap masculinity in exchange for “full humanity” and a “gender-free” world.
These exhortations, though, strike me as wishful thinking. Dismissing positive visions of masculinity certainly wouldn’t eliminate the demand for masculinity; the hunger for a sense of identity doesn’t just disappear. Practically speaking, it just creates a void for the Andrew Tates and Jordan Petersons of the world to fill more easily.
And few people are calling to abolish femininity. There are critiques, certainly, of its more toxic elements — like dangerous pressures to be thin, or encouragements to go under the knife — but it’s rare to hear feminists call for women to reject femininity altogether. Instead, the movement has worked to educate women on the more harmful aspects of femininity while widening space in womanhood for those who don’t conform and allowing women who want to embrace traditionally feminine activities to do so.
We can do for men what feminism did for women: name the harmful pressures, expand what counts as being a “good” man in society, and free people from the norms that make them less healthy and less connected. The valorization of dominance, the stigma around asking for help, and the equation of manhood with control needn’t be the future of masculinity.
Daniel Cox, the director of the Survey Center on Family Life at the American Enterprise Institute, thinks part of the appeal of traditional gender roles is that they offer men clarity — a sense that there’s a defined place for them and that they’re needed. “The primary messaging that all these men are hearing is that no one needs you, women can do it on their own,” he told me. It’s a message that leaves men confused and unmoored.
In response, Cox pointed to “relational masculinity” as an idea that could help men and that might also be more compatible with what women are looking for in partners.
“I think a lot of newly married husbands and new dads feel that weight of responsibility to protect and provide for their family and it can give you a lot of meaning,” he said. “Otherwise you might say why am I grinding, right? But when you’re doing it on behalf of someone else and someone needs you, it’s incredibly motivating…I think we’ve just fundamentally lost that idea of being in service to each other, whether it’s to your family, your community, or country.”
While some women will roll their eyes at the idea of men wanting to feel needed, if we’re being honest, that’s a deeply human, universal desire. In one recent study of over 3,000 Americans, people who believed they were needed — whether by their family, their work, or their community — reported being significantly happier and more satisfied with their lives. It wasn’t about egotism; it was about having a sense of purpose from something outside yourself.
The future can be different
It’s not a total mystery why the gender revolution has stalled; incorporating caregiving into masculine identity asks men to give up some advantages and embrace work that’s long been seen as feminine and undervalued. But countries like France — where Briselli found that men’s and women’s views on sharing housework are surprisingly aligned — show that it’s possible for men to see engaged fatherhood and domestic labor not as reluctant helping but as something core to being a good man. Even in the US, things are changing. Roughly 20 percent of American parents report being in genuinely egalitarian partnerships.
And women aren’t going back to the 1950s. They’re not giving up their educations, careers, or staying in relationships that don’t feel like partnerships. The data suggests that, even if they did, fertility would only fall faster.
Whether society-wide fertility can ever rise again under conditions of gender equality remains genuinely uncertain; researchers like Lappegård say they have more questions right now than answers. But what’s at stake is far more than birth rates — it’s whether men and women can actually build lives together.
