 Article Highlights:
In May, CNBC and SurveyMonkey asked 4,130 American adults about the American Dream.¹ Within the data lies a gender gap that I feel deserves more attention than it has received. Among Gen Z respondents who haven't married, 38% of men say getting married is completely within reach. Among women, 24%. Asked whether they even want to marry, 22% of Gen Z women say no, double the rate of the men. On children, the distance widens: 29% of women say they're not interested, against 17% of men. The harsh explanations and broad generalizations always arrive quickly whenever news outlets discuss the deteriorating popularity of marriage. "Dating apps broke everyone." "Nobody is socializing and meeting each other anymore." " Modern culture toxicized men." "The economy broke everything." The list goes on… I have no real interest in relitigating any of the above statements. Instead, the result I find much more compelling is the consistent, double-digit gap between young men and young women on the topic of marriage and family. I think there is a simple but fascinating explanation: the two groups are looking at the same marriage decision and seeing wildly different future outcomes. The price tag associated with getting married and starting a family is inherently different for men and women -- and this new generation of women may be the first in history to calculate the cost accurately before deciding to pay it. Underestimating the Effects of Motherhood In 2018, economists Ilyana Kuziemko, Jessica Pan, Jenny Shen, and Ebonya Washington published a working paper with a title that gives away the finding: "The Mommy Effect: Do Women Anticipate the Employment Effects of Motherhood?"² Using decades of data from the United States and Britain, then end result was no. The research found that women entering motherhood consistently underestimated what it would do to their professional lives. They struggled to keep working at rates they did before having a child. The biggest surprise, however, showed up in their own survey responses: attitudes about work and family shifted sharply after the first child, in a way that attitudes about almost nothing else shift in adulthood. For decades, the average American woman walking into motherhood has had an overly optimistic projection of her own career prospects after having children. And this high cost only became apparent after the decision was already made. So the question begs: what information is visible now that wasn't visible in previous generations of women? The Gender Split in the Earnings Data The answer to the previous questions comes from research that simply did not exist when today's 55-year-old women were marrying. Economist Henrik Kleven has tracked American men's and women's earnings around the birth of a first child using data going back to 1968.³ Although there is a gender gap in wages, the two lines run almost perfectly parallel before starting a family. Then they split. Sharply.  Fatherhood registers as a financial non-event. In fact, some research even points to fathers advancing professionally after getting married and starting a family (more in next section). Compare that with motherhood -- where women's earnings are reduced by roughly a third relative to men's, and this gap does not close. A 2023 study in PNAS by Douglas Almond, Yi Cheng, and Cecilia Machado highlighted an even more stark reality. Instead of survey data, they used administrative earnings records from 811,000 American workers, a sample about a hundred times larger than anything before it.⁴ Mothers' incomes fell by roughly half after a first child and stayed depressed for years. The key detail from this research: the penalty held even for women who out-earned their partners before the birth. Those women took a 60 percent hit relative to their lower-earning husbands, the largest drop of any group in the study. The theory that couples rationally hand the career sacrifice to whichever partner earns less is disproven by this data. Simply put, in American households, the sacrifice goes typically to the mother, even if she is the breadwinner. What Waiting Is Worth Amalia Miller, using the government's long-running survey of American women, found that each year of delayed motherhood raised career earnings by about 10 percent.⁵ When you project that compounding difference over a standard 30-year career window, the math becomes staggering. For a college-educated professional, delaying motherhood by about 5 years can result in an additional $495,000 to $556,000 in lifetime earnings -- a financial premium that holds true even when controlling for education, total hours worked, and marital status. On the men’s side a ledger, there were some ~slightly~ different results. As 2025 Bankrate analysis of Census data found that full-time working fathers earn about 25 percent more than full-time working men without children, with no detectable parenthood penalty anywhere in the data.⁶ Sociologists have documented the fatherhood premium for decades.⁷ For a young men (like myself), family and money point the same direction. For us, these things come bundled with prosperity, which is a big reason why many men view marriage and family as a prerequisite for the American Dream. For women, though, the survey demonstrates a mirror image. Gen Z women were much more likely than the men to name financial stability, the freedom to pursue their passions, and getting their dream job as requirements of the American Dream. It's also very notable that women's disinterest in children exceeds their disinterest in marriage. If respondents were solely pricing the financial cost factor, that is exactly the pattern you would expect. The research says the penalty attaches to the stroller more than the altar, but we all know the two often go hand-in-hand. Why This Generation Views Marriage & Family With the gender pay gap closing (women ages 25 to 34 now earn about 95 cents for every dollar earned by men their age, down from a 26-cent gap in the early 1980s), opportunity for women to succeed in their careers is greater than ever.⁸ This is an extremely constructive trend. One de facto externality of this trend, however, is that the financial costs associated with motherhood hamper a woman’s career trajectory more acutely than previous generations. Millennial and Gen Z women have become much more public about this tradeoff, openly documenting the collision of career and caregiving. The financial penalty of leaving your career to raise children is now a topic that shows up in group chat or on Tik Tok. Clearly, this visibility is powerful enough to reshape how young women map out the entire trajectory of their lives. The Other Side of the Story [One acknowledgment before going further: this article deliberately stays on the financial side of the marriage equation. The emotional side has its own body of research, and it generally favors marriage. Married people report higher life satisfaction on average, especially those who describe their spouse as their best friend.⁹ I'm setting this research aside because it isn't the variable that changed. What’s changed between generations is the visibility of the financial math, so that's where this article lives] If the story ended here, this would be a demographics article. But this article is about more than just demographics. It's about using psychology and financial awareness to improve our decision-making in life. All of the data I have provided thus far concerns costs that are individual, near-term, and easy to see: the paycheck, the promotion, the professional sacrifice over next five years… Regular readers will recognize the footprint of present bias all over this demographical trend. As humans, we naturally over-weight what is vivid and immediate, while discounting outcomes that are diffuse and distant -- even when the distant rewards are significantly larger. In this case, the career penalty of early motherhood is highly visible and front-of-mind. The compounding, long-term wealth benefits of a shared household are not. Two people sharing one roof and one set of fixed costs builds wealth much faster than two people running parallel lives. Jay Zagorsky's long-run tracking of American households found married people accumulating substantially more per-person wealth than their single counterparts, with the gap widening over the length of the marriage.¹⁰ The largest financial risk inside marriage, divorce, has itself been falling for decades, and economist Dana Rotz has shown that later marriage is a major reason why.¹¹ The very delay that protects a woman's earnings also appears to protect the marriage she eventually enters. In my opinion, this is exactly why college-educated women marry at the highest rates of any group in the country and divorce at the lowest.¹² They face the largest earnings incentive to delay getting married and starting a family, so they delay. But they also very much understand that there is significant incentive to marry in today's America -- so eventually they do! It's more of a societal scheduling problem rather than an official verdict. Intelligent women are seeing the career penalty for having children and responding accordingly. The Takeaway If you are a woman in your 20s or 30s, I want you to know that your caution is justified. The economics of getting married and starting a family at a young age just don’t make much sense for accomplishing your immediate goals. The question is which window you are pricing on. The child penalty hits hardest in the first five to ten years; the joint household benefits run for forty years. Both equations deserve to be factored in, but only one of them is loudly discussed online. For the older generations: if you are watching your adult daughter/son or granddaughter/grandson cooling on marriage, it's important to understand why that may be. Their knowledge of the economics of marriage is built on better database than yours ever was. If you really want to help, the conversation worth having with this age group is about the emotional and financial experiences they can't immediately see at their age (and shouldn't be expected to). Tell them about why the positive effects of building a life together over the long run outweigh the negatives of the near future. Finally, marriage requires a partner, timing, and luck, and the right financial answer varies enormously with your career, your field, your family support, and what you actually want from your life. But if you find yourself firmly planted on one side of the fence, it's worth understanding more about the other side of the equation. If you're certain marriage is an obvious move, ask whether you've priced the penalty that lands on one partner's career, and whose career that will be. If you're certain it's a bad deal, ask whether you're pricing a five-year window or a forty-year one. Strong certainty in either direction usually means you’re not evaluating the full picture. Previous generations of women underestimated what motherhood would cost them. This one may underestimate what the benefits of a collective household may eventually pay back. More Reading: A 3-Step Formula for Combating Market Anxiety Why Women Outperform Men in the Market but Worry More About Retirement The Deferral Decade: The Hidden Price of 'Surviving' Middle Age References 1. CNBC/SurveyMonkey American Dream Pulse Survey, conducted May 6–11, 2026, n=4,130 U.S. adults. 2. Kuziemko, I., Pan, J., Shen, J., & Washington, E. (2018). "The Mommy Effect: Do Women Anticipate the Employment Effects of Motherhood?" NBER Working Paper 24740. 3. Kleven, H. (2022). "Child Penalties and Gender Inequality," NBER Reporter, No. 1. 4. Almond, D., Cheng, Y., & Machado, C. (2023). "Large motherhood penalties in US administrative microdata." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 120(29). 5. Miller, A. (2011). "The effects of motherhood timing on career path." Journal of Population Economics, 24(3), 1071–1100. (Lifetime figures modeled across a 30-year career window based on Miller's baseline 10% annual delay premium.) 6. Bankrate analysis of U.S. Census Bureau Current Population Survey data (2025). 7. Killewald, A. (2013). "A Reconsideration of the Fatherhood Premium." American Sociological Review, 78(1), 96–116. 8. Pew Research Center analysis of Current Population Survey data (Published March 2025). 9. Grover, S., & Helliwell, J. (2019). "How's Life at Home? New Evidence on Marriage and the Set Point for Happiness." Journal of Happiness Studies, 20(2), 373–390. 10. Zagorsky, J. L. (2005). "Marriage and divorce's impact on wealth." Research on Aging, 27(6), 637–654. 11. Rotz, D. (2016). "Why Have Divorce Rates Fallen? The Role of Women's Age at Marriage." Journal of Human Resources, 51(4), 961–1002. 12. Wang, W. (2018). "The Marriage Divide: How and Why Education Matters for Family Stability." Institute for Family Studies Research Brief.
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