What The Hell America!

By double-digit margins, more U.S. adults say there’s too little emphasis on encouraging boys to talk about their feelings and to do well in school compared with girls— but significant differences emerge when this is broken down by party affiliation, according to new findings from the Pew Research Center.

Fifty-seven percent of U.S. adults said there’s too little emphasis on encouraging boys to talk about their feelings, compared with 31 percent who think this about girls. Democrats are far more likely to believe this about boys, with 70 percent of them agreeing versus 45 percent of Republicans.

There are also significant differences along ideological lines when it comes to other questions about raising boys versus girls: 49 percent of Republicans think there is too little emphasis on teaching boys to stand up for themselves, compared with 26 percent of Democrats. Forty-seven percent of Republicans also think there is too little emphasis on teaching boys to be leaders, compared with 26 percent of Democrats. The survey did not ask about nonbinary teens.

Women are overwhelmingly underrepresented in senior leadership roles in both the private sector and elected office.

In 2017, Pew conducted a broad study looking at Americans’ opinions on the differences between men and women and whether people believe they are biological or driven by societal expectations. As part of that survey, the researchers included questions on raising children. Juliana Horowitz, a senior associate director of research at Pew Research Center, told The 19th that the 2017 survey fit within the context of the broader national conversation about men and masculinity, specifically the question of whether men were being left behind. Fast forward to the present, and the Pew team thought it would be interesting to repeat these questions to see how these views have or have not changed.

Horowitz explained that the researchers found that the main shifts were on questions about raising girls. More people now say there is the right amount of emphasis — versus too little — on encouraging girls to do well in school, be leaders, stand up for themselves and to talk about their feelings.

There were only modest changes found in the data between 2017 and today when it came to views on raising boys.

“It’s interesting because there have been a lot of conversations more recently about how boys are doing academically and whether society hasn’t paid enough attention to what’s happening to boys,” Horowitz said. When it comes to the status of girls today, she said that it is “really interesting to see that people see, for lack of a better word, in their minds an improvement. … More people are maybe thinking that we’re doing OK by girls, but that sentiment hasn’t changed to the same extent when it comes to views of raising boys.”

This is reflected in the differences in the split between Democrats and Republicans on the questions of encouraging boys to stand up for themselves and be leaders, with Republicans being much more likely than Democrats to see a lack of emphasis.

The partisan split on raising boys versus girls was mirrored in a question from a parallel Pew survey of teens. Teens who identify as Republicans are more likely than those who identify as Democrats to say marriage and kids are highly important for their future: 43 percent of Republican teens said marriage was extremely or very important to them personally, compared with 29 percent of Democratic teens. Likewise, 38 percent of Republican teens said that having children was extremely or very important to them, compared with 24 percent of Democratic teens. On other issues about imagining a fulfilling future, teens from both parties gave similar answers.

“These are gaps of more than 10 percentage points,” Horowitz stressed, adding that the answers given by teens were consistent with what researchers have seen in surveys with adults, too, when it comes to marriage and children and the idea of personal fulfillment. “It was interesting to see that reflected even among young people, that there’s this sort of divergence by party in how they see these sorts of family events playing out in the future in terms of what they want for themselves.”

Horowitz said this split feels in direct conversation with another recent survey conducted by Pew on teens’ views on gender identity and whether a person’s gender can be different than their sex at birth. The researchers found similar differences among the teen population around that topic by party as they did among the adult population. “We see so much party polarization — not just on hot button issues that you might expect to see party divides on, but we often see party divides on so much of what we study, and that’s reflected in the views of teens. They’re no less polarized by party than the adults.”

The adult study comes from a survey of 6,204 adults and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 1.5 percentage points. For the recent teen study, 1,391 teens aged 13 to 17 were surveyed; the margin of error was 3.3 percentage points.