Teen and adult acceptance of working mothers has risen to an all-time high, about double what it was in the late 1970s, researchers at San Diego State University and the University of California, San Diego said Monday.

The academics examined nationwide studies that polled 600,000 adults and 12th graders between 1976 and 2013. Participants were asked whether a pre-schooler would suffer if their mother worked.

Millennials are far more accepting of working mothers than past generations were at the same age.

Fifty-nine percent of 12th graders said the child would suffer in the 1970s, but opposition among high school students fell to 34 percent in the 1990s and 22 percent in the 2010s. The change in adults’ views was similar, with opposition declining from 68 percent in 1977 to 42 percent in 1998 and 35 percent in 2012.

“This goes against the popular belief that millennials want to ‘turn back the clock’, or that they are less supportive of working moms because their own mothers worked,” said SDSU psychology professor Jean Twenge, one of the lead authors.

But despite the growing sense of gender equality, there was a rising subset of millennials who hold more patriarchal views. Twenty-seven present of 12th graders in the 1990s though it was better for a husband to work and his wife to stay at home, compared to 32 percent of high school seniors in the last few years. There was also growth in teens who believed husbands, not wives, should make important family decisions, from 14 percent to 17 percent.

“Millennials might see marriage as only for certain types of people,” Twenge said. "With the marriage rate at an all-time low, today's young people may believe that marriage is a traditional choice involving more rigid gender roles."

The study was published by “Psychology of Women Quarterly.”

 

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