Men also want it all

Does anyone actually miss the ‘50s?

Career success is not more important than starting a family for most men. (Photo by Bettmann/Contributor)

Men are no longer the breadwinners they once were. In 1972, husbands earned more than their wives in at least 85% of American marriages. Husbands were the sole earners in more than half of those.

Today, the share of heterosexual married couples where the man makes more money than the woman has fallen to just 55%. Only 23% of marriages rely solely on a husband’s income. And it’s not just women’s earning potential that has increased their economic independence: Unlike most of their midcentury counterparts, women today can open credit card accounts and take out mortgages without the bank requiring a man’s sign-off.

Some see the rise of the female breadwinner as a bad deal for men. Women may have gained independence, but they have done so at the cost of men’s sense of purpose. “Men are more likely to flourish when they see themselves as providers,” wrote Brad Wilcox, a University of Virginia professor and author of the book Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, along with co-author Maria Baer. “Men do better when they feel needed — and being a reliable breadwinner makes them feel needed.”

But The Argument’s latest poll of 3,000 registered voters, fielded nationally between July 20 and 26, suggests that an end to male breadwinning might actually suit men’s preferences just fine.

When asked whether they personally agreed or disagreed with the statement “men should be the breadwinner,” just 34% of all male respondents agreed. A substantial majority disagreed.

One explanation for what is going on here is that men are answering out of solidarity with women — or, more cynically, a desire to give the socially desirable response — rather than pure self-interest. They reject the traditional division of labor into male breadwinning and female caregiving because they understand that sharing these responsibilities is good for women.

And yet, when we asked men what was more important to them — career success or getting married and having children — 44% of men prioritized family while 41% prioritized work, around the same shares as women. Among conservative men, the share prioritizing getting married and having children was even higher.

On the right, there is a sense that feminism has forced men into egalitarian relationships they do not want. Traditional marriage gave men a clearly defined role: to provide the primary income to their families. They would like that script back because without it they are in crisis.

Conversely, the left has tended to frame men relinquishing the breadwinner role as a moral imperative. There’s a sense that cheering on their wives’ careers and taking on child care is the least they can do.

Neither framing captures what our polling indicates: that changing gender norms around who spends time at home and who spends time at work might actually align with men’s own interests. Indeed, a majority of fathers say they spend too little time with their children, mostly due to work obligations.

Men don’t know what other men want

The idea that most men want to be breadwinners is not just culturally pervasive — it’s what the men we surveyed think, too. Despite a plurality prioritizing marriage and children themselves, our male respondents overwhelmingly assumed other men prioritized career success.

This is not just a male misperception issue. Women also overestimated the extent to which men prioritize their careers. Seventy-three percent of female respondents said they thought career success was more important to a majority of men than marriage and children, well above what men self-report.

Unsurprisingly, many male respondents also seemed to overestimate how many people agreed with the statement “men should be the breadwinners.” A plurality, 44%, thought the majority of Americans held this belief, while a plurality of female respondents, 46%, felt the opposite. In reality, the share of support among both men and women was much lower, at around 34% and 30%, respectively.

As in our February poll, there is little evidence in our survey data to suggest that men see traditional gender roles as more favorable than modern egalitarian ones. As Jerusalem Demsas recently pointed out, strong baseline support for gender equality is an underrated fact of our modern political landscape: Around 81% of both male and female respondents agreed that women are equally suited to leadership. Among male respondents who voted for Donald Trump, the share was lower but still 72%.

The family-first MAGA breadwinner

Of course, being a man who values family over career is not the same as being a committed feminist. It is possible to think family is important and also want to reinstitute traditional gender roles. In fact, that seems to be more or less the prescription of today’s conservative thought leaders: Men should care about marriage and family, but they should behave as 1950s breadwinners.

The modern MAGA marriage of “pro-family” policy and masculinist ideals finds some support in our poll. Male Trump voters were considerably more likely to prioritize marriage and children over their careers than male Kamala Harris voters — 57% compared to 33%. They were also much more likely to agree with the statement “men should be the breadwinners,” with 51% endorsing the statement compared to just 15% of their Harris-voting peers.¹

In itself, conservative men prioritizing family over career in a survey is not that surprising. What is striking is the gap between these men’s self-reported preference and what they assumed about other men. While over half of male Trump voters said getting married and having children was more important to them than career success, just 24% said this was true of most men.

In other words, conservative men want something for themselves that they think is at odds with what the majority of men want.

There has never been a better time to be a father

The reality is that most people would probably like to have fulfilling family lives as well as meaningful careers.

Having both was very difficult for American women until the late 20th century. Marriage bars — employer policies that barred married women from being hired or retained — were common through the early 1900s. But women’s labor force participation rose from around 40% in the mid-1960s to above 55% just two decades later.

Men also gained something tangible in the family realm over the same period. It is now common — and socially accepted — for fathers to be present during childbirth, push strollers in public, and pick their kids up from school. For children born as late as 1993, 77% of fathers didn’t take a single day of leave after their child was born. For children born between 2014 and 2022, that was true of only 35% of fathers.

The gap in the amount of time American men and women spend with their children has been narrowing for decades. Gen X fathers spent more than twice as much time with their kids as their predecessors did at the same age. Many found this time in part by cutting back daily hours at work.

Prominent voices on the right blame liberalism for rupturing the American family. They argue that its careerist individualism pushed Americans to marry later, have fewer children, and care more about money than anything else. Wilcox has dubbed this the “Midas Mindset,” the idea that “what matters most in your life is building your own individual brand, seeing work as the summit of your life, and steering clear of the encumbrances of family life.”

But to the extent that many men today can embrace being involved parents — who can opt out of the rat race in order to spend more time at home — it is largely thanks to the advances of the women who now contribute much more to household earnings than they used to.

In a world where men do not want to be breadwinners, women joining the labor force is a positive-sum game. If we take men at their word and assume that many of them would quite like to trade time at work for time at home, then discarding traditional gender roles is what makes that possible.

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1. When we cut the data by self-reported ideology rather than 2024 vote, this pattern becomes even more pronounced: Sixty-one percent of conservative men said marriage and children were more important than career, and 55% of them agreed that men should be the breadwinners. Among men who identified as liberal, 31% prioritized family over career and 12% endorsed the male breadwinner model.