Today's Youth Prefer Less Old-Fashioned Relationship Roles

The 50s are over. Today's youth prefer that their partners share equal relationship roles.

New research conducted by David Pedulla at the University of Texas at Austin and Sarah Thebaud at the University of California Santa Barbara investigated just how today's young couples prefer their relationships to be structured.

They used a survey to identify any roles among a nationally representative sample of unmarried, childless group of men and women between the ages of 18 to 32 years old.

"This research highlights an important disjuncture between the ideals and preferences of young men and women and the workplace policies and practices that are currently standard in the United States," Thébaud said, in a news release.

Findigns revealed that most of the respondents chose a relationship where earning money, household responsibilities and caregiving responsibilities were shared equally between partners.

"Our study provides compelling evidence that if policies such as flexible scheduling, parental leave, and subsidized child care were universally in place, women would be even more likely to want an egalitarian relationship with their partner and much less likely to want to be primarily responsible for housework and childcare," Pedulla added. "These findings offer new insights that may be useful in guiding policymakers and organizations that are interested in reducing gender inequality and improving the work and family lives of young men and women."

"A key implication of this research is that men's and women's current work-family arrangements are often suboptimal and result from a particular set of unsupportive workplace policies and practices," Thébaud said. "What our study helps to show is that if we were to change the workplace policy environment, we would likely see changes in how people express their ideal preferences for balancing work and family life."

More information regarding the findings can be seen via the American Sociological Review.

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