by Maria Baer and Brad Wilcox (@BradWilcoxIFS)
Young women are losing faith in marriage. This is the takeaway from a dramatic new Pew poll showing that in the past 30 years, the share of 12th grade girls who say they are most likely to “choose to get married” one day has dropped more than 20 percentage points, from 83% in 1993 to 61% in 2023. Meanwhile the share of young men who hope to get married has remained steady, at around 75%.
Other polls show similar findings. The Survey Center on American Life recently found that a majority of single women (55%) think that single women are happier than married women (they’re really not—more on that in a moment), whereas a majority (68%) of single men take the opposite view.
There is no debating that women’s confidence in and devotion to marriage is falling. But there is robust debate about whether that’s a bad thing, and what’s causing it. Theories about young women’s declining interest in wedlock typically fall into two camps. The problem is either 1) the boys, or 2) the (feminist) girls.
