Fewer high school girls than boys are planning to get married

SALT LAKE CITY — New research from Pew shows 61% of 12th-grade girls want to get married someday, compared to 74% of boys.

Director of Women and Leadership Susan Madsen at Utah State University said just last year, a report came out showing that a majority of girls in high school don’t feel that boys their age respect them.

“Seventy-six percent of girls don’t even feel that boys respect girls,” Madsen said. “That’s, I mean, you’re not going to want to marry and have in your life someone that you feel doesn’t respect women and girls. And maybe that’s becoming more important to young women these days, to be respected.”

She said although we use language saying different responsibilities like housework or childcare are equally important, girls are not seeing the same amount of respect towards these responsibilities.

“There is a higher appetite for young women today to feel respected, to feel like their mind matters and their heart matters,” Madsen said. “I think a lot of young women want to use their intellects, want to go to college, want to learn, want to be doing work that values their minds.”

Beyond that, a higher degree of violence is making trust difficult. Madsen pointed to CDC data showing that in 2022, one in five high school girls reported being sexually assaulted in the last 12 months.

“When you go through those things, you’re really leery about commitment and trust with men,” Madsen said. 

The same report from Pew shows fewer young women are thinking about having children.

Madsen said more girls than boys are looking at the cost of living, worried about the expenses of having a family, whether they will have support if they choose a career, and motherhood.

“Women still have the brunt of caregiving responsibilities, the brunt of domestic labor, of emotional labor, and those things,” Madsen said. “Some of those family-friendly practices, primarily the remote work and the flexible schedules, are going away, national level as well. Federal government employees are pulling in the flexibility, and you’ll see that women are leaving the workforce because of that, because we’re responsible for the kids, for the most part.”

Madsen said these trends are troubling because data shows both nationally and locally women report greater happiness in marriage, children are better taken care of, and are more likely to go to college in the future.

She said families and women need to feel there is a support system around them.

“It’s just critical if we want our youth to want to get married, to want to have that American dream of a family and children and so forth, that we need to better provide the resources as companies and organizations to be able to support that,” Madsen said.

She said parents also have a responsibility, and they can start by learning how to have better conversations with their children around hard topics. Lawmakers can also help.

“I don’t think a lot of parents have guidance on some of these kinds of things… that would help people actually go to parents or others if there were attempts, you know, like child sexual abuse and those kinds of things,” Madsen said. “I think we have some of those resources already available and we need to invest in more resources to make sure that we do better, in terms of our state, than the nation in terms of keeping these relationships.