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The surprising gender gap at the heart of America’s baby bust<br>Gen Z men want kids. Gen Z women have questions.

by Sean Illing and Anna North<br>Mar 5, 2026, 12:15 PM UTC<br>Share<br>Gift

“Across party lines and demographic groups, young men are eager to be dads.”

That’s the surprising conclusion that Anna North, my Vox colleague, uncovered when she dove into the data to find out young people’s views about forming families. Birth rates have been in free fall, and talk of a demographic crisis has increasingly filled the discourse. In much of that commentary, the brunt of the blame has been directed at young people, who purportedly aren’t interested in settling down. But the truth, according to Anna, is more complex.

Key takeaways

Young men across the political spectrum really want to be dads — more than you’d expect.<br>Young women are far less enthusiastic, and the reasons why are pretty understandable.<br>The gap has real consequences, but there are proven policy fixes that could help.

In addition to Gen Z men expressing interest in procreating, she also found something else that was surprising: There is a real gender gap between young men and young women, with young women showing greater hesitation about the prospect of having kids.

It’s a fascinating divide that could be hugely consequential, so I asked Anna to come join me on the Friday edition of The Gray Area to explain what she found in her reporting. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, which drops every Monday and Friday, so listen to and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What were you looking for when you started reporting on this piece on how Gen Z men and women are thinking about parenthood and how differently they’re thinking about it?

I saw this really interesting poll of young voters, Gen Z voters, and looked at male Trump voters, male Harris voters, female Trump voters, and female Harris voters and asked them to rank, what are the things you think are important in a good life.

The male Trump voters actually rated having children as number one among 12 or 13 different options. Nobody else had it up that high. Not any of the women, no matter how they voted. And not male Harris voters, either.

And if you look across polls, overwhelmingly, you’ll see young men more excited, more enthusiastic about having children one day than young women. And I could think of a lot of possible reasons why that might be, but I wanted to dig into it a little bit.

Related<br>The one goal that unites most Gen Z men

I have the numbers here, and I don’t want to butcher it. This is from your piece on a 2023 Pew poll: 57 percent of men between 18 and 34 said they wanted to have kids one day, and only 45 percent of women said that. That was a little surprising to me. Maybe it shouldn’t be.

I was kind of surprised by that. As you say, I thought it was a pretty big gap, especially given that the narrative that I think we had heard about young Gen Z people generally over the last couple of years is this is a generation that doesn’t want kids.

This generation doesn’t want to get married. This is a generation that’s really worried about the future, and feeling really alienated, and doesn’t want to take these steps toward conventional family. And so, I thought it was interesting that these high numbers of Gen Z men were saying, no, actually we do want kids.

If you dig back into the historical polling, it’s a little wonky. There’s some evidence that women without children, for a long time, have had a little bit more trepidation than men without children. And partly that’s for reasons that make sense. They know that their careers could take a hit. They’ve all read those articles about the motherhood penalty. They know that they will probably have to give birth, which men don’t have to do, and deal with physical recovery and deal with all of the stereotyping and stigmatizing that comes with having a female body that becomes a mother in this world.

So, it’s not weird that young women might have more anxieties. But, I think what was striking to me was the size of the gap and, really, the size of the enthusiasm among men of a generation that were expressing this pretty conventional social aspiration to have a family.

How do you explain their increased interest? Why are Gen Z men...