Stefanie O'Connell

But it is something that I wish we were talking about 20 years ago because I do think it would have served both men and women better.

I think it's going to be a struggle for a while, but I do think it will change because things always change, not necessarily in ways that we can predict.

So I think there will be some change.

I can't say what it will be.

What I do see that I think is a little bit

dispiriting is the extent to which the attitudes rarely change over the course of a lifetime so once you've basically adopted a model of relationships that's really predicated on like well men should have more of the access to financial resources and women should basically compromise themselves and serve themselves in ways that support men's ambitions it's a really hard to break out of that model within the same person it's much easier if you're talking about then a next generation

So one of the things I think about as a parent of a young child is how am I modeling this?

How am I modeling these dynamics for my child so that they understand that anyone who asks you to shrink yourself does not have your best interests at heart.

And so even when we're dealing with

kind of outside cultural forces that want to pull us into inequality as much as we might aspire to more equitable relationships.

At the end of the day, the school is still calling mom.

The school is, the doctor still calls mom, right?

Even if you're saying we're going to share this, the world outside of you is trying to pull you back into these very patriarchal roles.

But I'm always pushing back against that because I think it's so, so important as I think we're seeing now with Gen Z and how much the next generation

winds up kind of carrying the legacy of the ugliest and worst parts of some of our older models of what it means to be a good woman or partner or wife or good husband or partner in ways that kind of are toxic.

because they are really predicated on a model of dominance and submission instead of real partnership.

And that's the tension that I think we have not reckoned with.

And the data show us pretty clearly just how much that is something that is learned through observation.

So children who are raised by parents who share household labor, for example, those boys become much more likely to share household labor in their own homes,

When they become adults, they become much more likely to be married to women who are engaged in the paid labor force and who do well in the paid labor force.