Name: One third of Gen Z men say wives should ‘obey’ husbands | DW News
Uploaded: 2026-03-08T17:29:15.000Z
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A new Gen Z survey has sent shockwaves on the Internet.

Adverbs of degree

It shows that almost one third of Gen Z men think women should obey their husbands.

Here's a quick taste of how people have responded to the survey on social media.

Incel culture needs to be stigmatized more.

This isn't the male loneliness epidemic, it's a misogyny epidemic.

We should normalize calling out bigotry and educating men who think this way.

So today on International Women's Day we are going to talk about this with one of the authors of the survey.

And why should we all be worried about it?

Surprisingly, of all the different kind of groups in terms of age generation and gender, Zenny if you want, men are quite conservative, almost stands out in comparison to, well, women who are generally more progressive in all accounts, but even also the older generation of men.

It is concerning, but it also makes me very sad.

Professor Hee Jung Chung is the director of King's Global Institute for Women's Leadership.

The survey was a joint project between her institute and ipsos, a market research firm.

It was designed to understand how adults, both men and women, perceive gender roles and gender equality in 2026.

So we've conducted a survey across more than 23,000 individuals across 29 countries.

So countries include countries like the US, UK, Australia, like Germany, but also we have countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Korea, Japan, etc.

So wide range of countries across the globe.

And we asked individuals between age 18 to 75, both men and women, a representative of the population if you want.

Every year we conduct a survey of how do people feel about gender equality today?

Do you think we have achieved gender equality?

If not, which aspects haven't we achieved?

But also this year we want to really focus on what it means to be a man and a woman because there has been a lot of concerns around this whole tradwife ism or that men kind of becoming these alpha more dominant forms of masculinity.

So we wanted to really test out some of these, if you want these kind of rhetoric or myths that has been going around in a lot of kind of social media and media and yeah, that's we found the whole range of very interesting outcomes.

This proved to be the most controversial question.

People in 29 countries were asked whether a wife should always obey her husband.

31% or almost 1 third of Gen Z men said yes.

Compare that with older men or baby boomers to the left, only 13% of them agreed with the statement.

And women in general were far less likely to agree.

Gen Z Men on many accounts, if you ask them, like on very specifically on certain things, they are also saying gender roles need to be renegotiated.

However, they're the ones that not only do they say they are personally very traditional, but they also perceive the world to be very traditional.

So it's really kind of shocking to see how that they really stand out in terms of the population.

Let's take a look at some of the other results that have to do with how men and women perceive gender roles.

For instance, when asked if a husband should have the final word on important decisions made in his home, 1/3 of all Gen Z men agreed.

21% of Gen Z men think a real woman should never initiate sex.

That's one in five men between the ages of 18 and 29 who believe that.

There's a whole range of ways of trying to interpret what this means and why Gen Z men really stand out in terms of the traditional gender roles.

One thing is about the current kind of rhetoric, but also kind of influencers, social media influencers, but also a lot of political leaders who are now really capitalizing on a lot of young men's grievances around being kind of lost in terms of what it means to be a man and saying, actually we need to go back to the traditional ways of being.

And then they bring in like issues around.

Biology is like men need to be the dominant.

That's what women want, et cetera, which, you know, again, is not what the rest of the population thinks.

Professor Chung also says young women are full of fear because the manifestation of these attitudes plays out where these women study, work and spend their time on a daily basis.

I've been teaching young people like, you know, 18 to 21 year olds for a very, very long time, for more than two decades.

And I think this is the last few years have really been a time where so the module I teach is mostly young women.

They're just like what is happening to our male peers?

I mean, like, we would like to love them and we would love to be partnering, you know, partnering up with them, but.

And they seem to be, you know, kind of being, you know, led astray by these social media influencers with their views of what women should be like, but also what men should be like, which isn't what women want.

But those influencers are telling them like, this is what women actually want.

Which is completely ludicrous because our data shows that gender role attitudes are absolutely polar opposite when it comes to Gen Zs.

And I just want to tell young men like, stop, stop, stop putting yourselves in these man boxes.

In this survey, men were also asked to gauge how well they think the fight for gender equality is going.

For instance, would things work better if more women held positions of power?

Have we gone so far in promoting women's equality that we are discriminating against men?

And are men being expected to do too much to Support equality?

Almost 60% of Gen Z men think that men are being expected to do too much.

This when the United nations tells us that women and Girls have just 64% of the legal rights of men globally.

In their words, women are turned away, not believed, re victimized or priced out of legal support.

Even here in the European Union, women have to work over 15 months to earn what men do in one year.

I asked Professor Chung what she would say to Gen Z men on International Women's Day because the fight for gender equality is their fight too.

And I hear your grievances, but you're looking at the wrong people to blame.

You need to be able to fight together with young women for a better society and maybe through renegotiating gender roles, but also just asking for more from your government, from your companies in regards to better work life balance, better pay, better working conditions.

And it's not just, you know, we're giving it to women.

We are getting to both like men and women and other genders.

And this is a moment that young people need to come together and fight collectively rather than each other.

We as women in International Women's Day about gender equality.

We can't have this conversation without men.

It is in the point where, like, we can't just be celebrating women on its own because without men and men's gender roles changing, there's a very like, there's a limit of how much change and gender equality we could actually achieve.