Do Cohorts Differ? Aging, Family Transitions, and the Resilience of Gendered Work–Family Desires During Early Adulthood

It was largely expected that cohort replacement would increase population support for egalitarian relationships but the failure of this shift to materialize has led scholars to draw inferences about age-related erosion of egalitarian aspirations. Yet, cohort differences in equality desires and the aging trajectories of these attitudes have not been empirically established. Using panel data on 11,788 individuals from the Monitoring the Future surveys (1976 – 2014), this study investigated whether desired work–family arrangements change as young adults age, whether key turning points influenced these trajectories, and whether these patterns differed across four birth cohorts. Findings show recent cohorts enter adulthood with less gender conventional desires than earlier cohorts but are no more likely to desire dual-earner arrangements. Both aging and transitions into marriage and parenthood are associated with shifts toward more gender conventional work–family desires. Further attention to age related attitude changes is important to further understanding the stalled gender revolution.