If you’ve ever looked at your kids or grandkids and wondered whether old stereotypes about males being more likely to take risks and females being more trusting still apply, you’re not alone. Now, new research shows these differences are shrinking. A 2026 study published in PNAS Nexus found that differences in traits like patience, risk-taking, trust, and prosociality are shrinking among younger generations.
In other words, younger men and women are more psychologically similar than their parents’ or grandparents’ generations were at the same age.
Researchers Rainer Kotschy from Harvard and Uwe Sunde from LMU Munich combined data from the Global Preferences Survey (about 80,000 people across 76 countries in 2012) and the World Values Survey (roughly 380,000 people from 106 countries between 1981 and 2022). They focused on four preferences related to personality and daily decision-making: patience, risk-taking, trust, and prosociality (behaviors that benefit others).
Historically, women have tended to report lower risk tolerance and different patterns of altruism than men. The question the researchers wanted to answer was whether these gaps are changing over time.
The study’s main finding is that these gaps are narrowing by about 20% per generation.
After adjusting for the effects of aging, such as the tendency for people to become less willing to take risks as they get older, the researchers compared gender gaps by birth decade within countries. They found that across both datasets, gender gaps were smaller in younger cohorts for all four traits. For example, the gap between men and women born in the 1980s was about 20% smaller than it was for those born in the 1950s. On average, these gaps declined by just over 21% between the 1950s and 1980s birth cohorts.
Interestingly, men’s and women’s preferences converged faster in lower-income and less gender-equal countries, not just in wealthy, Western societies.
Sunde explained that this means women and men are becoming more similar in their preferences, which usually form early in life and tend to stay stable.
These preferences shape real-life outcomes like career choices, financial decisions, health behaviors, and relationships.
Other large cross-cultural studies have found similar patterns. Women tend to score higher on warmth and anxiety-related traits, but these differences are less pronounced among younger people. A 2022 study in Psychological Science also found that women born more recently tend to have higher conscientiousness, likely due to changes in gender roles and expectations.
Of course, no single study is conclusive. The authors point out some limitations.
First of all, it’s inherently tricky to fully separate the effects of being born in a particular era from the effects of simply getting older. The researchers used statistical controls and other arguments to address this, but some uncertainty remains.
Second, surveys rely on self-report, which can sometimes reflect what people think they should say rather than how they actually behave.
Lastly, some measures, such as questions about values to teach children, are indirect indicators of preferences rather than direct behavioral experiments. Future research tracking the same individuals over decades will help clarify how stable these shifts are throughout life.
Perhaps the lesson here isn’t that the world has turned upside down, but that it’s always been changing, sometimes in ways we only notice when we look back across the years.
Sources:
https://gps.econ.uni-bonn.de/about
https://isr.umich.edu/research/projects/world-values-survey-wvs/
