Conservative Gender Attitudes and Singlehood Among European Men

Matilde Perotti , Bocconi University
Elena Bastianelli, Bocconi University
Letizia Mencarini, Bocconi University

Singlehood has become a widespread social reality across Europe, reflecting profound demographic and cultural transformations. Yet, while women’s singlehood has been widely studied, men’s experiences remain underexplored. Motivated by the rise of antifeminist and incel-related ideas, this paper investigates which men are most likely to remain single and whether conservative gender attitudes hinder their partnership formation. Using newly released data from the Gender and Generations Survey II (GGS-II), we conduct a cohort analysis of men aged 35–45 and 45+ across twelve European countries. Our findings reveal that lower education, economic precarity, and traditional gender attitudes substantially increase men’s likelihood of remaining single, whereas these traits have negligible effects on women’s singlehood. Moreover, single men hold significantly more conservative gender attitudes than partnered men. To address endogeneity concerns, we implement an instrumental variable strategy that exploits historical female labor-force participation as a source of exogenous variation in early socialization. This study advances our understanding of how singlehood has spread across Europe through different generations and represents the first causal attempt to show how conservative gender attitudes contribute to men’s increasing singlehood.

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 Presented in Session 50. How Beliefs and Attitudes Shape Life Courses