Gender equality is under threat in a surprising  way: Your kids are beginning not to buy the idea.

“The Manosphere and Tradwife Culture Have Won. Suddenly, more teens think unequal pay for women and rigid gender roles are good.”

That’s the headline of a new article by the psychologist Jean Twenge, based on the research carried out by Monitoring the Future, which has been polling children on these matters for many years.

Beginning in 2024 there’s been a dramatic shift in how both boys and girls see gender roles. For years, the percentage of boys who thought it was best if men worked while women stayed home was low and steady at 12%. In 2024 it suddenly almost doubled.

Among girls, the jump in favoring rigid gender roles also jumped. Now twice as many girls as before agree it is better if men work and women stay home.

Social media is driving this. So are big changes in youth culture.

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Plus the failures of both Democratic and Republican politics. The  most animated Republican Party activists are against gender equality while Democrats are cluelessly confident that they know how to move equality forward. They don’t.

According to that Monitoring the Future study, young people who are heavy social media users are more likely to believe that women should stay home and that equal pay is not essential.

By itself, that’s not enough to say social media use causes these beliefs, but there is other evidence making the link more convincing.

Social media creates an audience of young people regularly exposed to those ideas about men and women. The manosphere and the traditional wives movements (tradwives) are active exposers.

The manosphere is not one group. It’s a loose network with issues ranging from men’s health to complaints about unfair treatment of men to some violent, threatening diatribes against women.

YouTube and TikTok are the most powerful venues. Some manosphere influencers have gotten billions of hits.

The tradwife movement is anti-feminist. It wants only men in leadership roles. The woman’s job is to please the man.

The biggest difference between older traditionalist views of a woman’s place and tradwives is scope and style. In short, the use of social media.

The Changing Youth Culture

There are close to 100,000 tradwifes social media accounts. The hashtag #tradwife has over 300 million views on TikTok, big enough for adolescents to come across many times, easy peasy, as they scroll.

Young people without college degrees continue to have the usual hard time making a go of it, but now college graduates find they cannot get the jobs they went to school for.

What they believed, with plenty of help, about achieving the American Dream turns out to be real no more.

University of Michigan polls that have tracked college attitudes for many years show that recent college grads have never been more downbeat about economic conditions than over the past four years. 

Gallup recently found that the portion of college graduates who thought it was a good time to find a “quality job” was a mere 19%, down from over 70% in 2022.

Jobs that new college graduates used to take just temporarily — you know, just to get on their feet until a real job comes along — find their feet permanently locked into low level jobs at Starbucks, as Apple “Geniuses” who sell computers, or Amazon warehouse workers.

The toll is not simply economical. It’s also psychological. “Your sense of your own existence grows fragile. And your job prospects are as fragile as your mental health,” according to an article in The Atlantic.

The impact of this on gender issues is not as direct as social media’s effects. Here are some possibilities:

The increased  competition between young men and women for good jobs will increase hostility between them.

On the other hand, as they see themselves as more a part of the working class, college-educated men and women see class rather than gender as key.

But for sure, this change in college graduate expectation is a formative event, which like Vietnam for my generation and post-World War II prosperity had on my father’s will have long lasting effects.

What happens politically when both your job chances and your existence grow fragile?

The most vibrant Republican activists are what in polite company is typically known as post-liberals or populists. 

But really the best term for the activists is Groypers, a catchall meme that political commentator Nick Fuentes helped make popular.

Groypers are a loose, growing network of white nationalists, Hitler admirers, antisemites and anti-feminists who have been strong Trump supporters in the past but now see him as a sellout. They want to be the vanguard of a new post-Trump Republican Party. 

Women calling themselves groypettes want to overturn feminist influence, which they see as moral corruption. They want men to rule the world — male authority versus female submissiveness. Some groypettes even want to give up voting.

Groypers have millions of followers on social media. One national news article estimates that about three-quarters of Republican staff members working in DC support them.

So do college Republican organizations.

Very important conservatives, like JD Vance, Tucker Carlson and the head of the conservative Heritage Foundation don’t criticize these groups but criticize people who do. It’s part of a strategy to unite the right.

As your teenage children or grandchildren can tell you, this movement is youth-targeting and social media driven. 

A Republican operative who is producing social media content for young people told an interviewer, “You guys might not be ready for this, but your kids are going to love it.”

“Young people that would normally be run-of-the-mill conservatives are debating the Holocaust.”

Democrats have no answer, no workable plan. Worse, though, is they think they do.  

Democratic supporters in action say Trump is on the ropes, the 2026 midterms look great, millions of people turned out for the No Kings rallies. Time for a change. “Let’s do it!” as they sprint from the locker room onto the field.

Ruy Teixiera, a friendly critic of the Democratic Party, calls this a mirage.

The party is stuck in the past with old ideas that have lost their appeal or never really had any.  

It’s a party with faith in institutions when the country’s mood is hostile to institutions. It’s no longer the party of the working class but has not staked out a convincing vision and strategy about what it has become instead.

Gender roles are a cultural issue, not just a political one. Democrats aren’t winning the culture. That victory is broader with more lasting consequences than beating Trump, who’ll be gone soon, quite possibly replaced by a Republican Party that is more threatening and smarter.

I don’t see any reason to believe that Democrats have the vision or knowledge to counter those forces that threaten to reverse women’s equality.

The sad but true fact is that the groypers are better at creating a vision and communicating it than either you, your sensible friends or the political party you all support do.