Men are more likely than women to want kids, study says. But has that always been true?

Who wants to have a baby these days, anyway?

Media and pop culture often portray young women as baby-seeking, family-craving, biological clock-ticking time bombs. (Think Monica on Friends, or even the infamous Billie Jean with her "schemes and plans" in Michael Jackson's hit song by the same name.)

But the reality may be quite different, because new research has yet again suggested that it's childless men, not women, who are more likely to say they want to be parents some day. 

Just over one-fifth (21 per cent) of childless women aged 18-34 recently polled by Pew Research Centre said they don't ever want to be parents, compared to 15 per cent of men. Conversely, 57 per cent of men said they want to have children some day, versus 45 per cent of women.

While this specific data is new, the trend certainly isn't, says Marina Adshade, an assistant professor of teaching at the University of British Columbia who specializes in economics and gender, who was not involved in the Pew study.

It was women who fought for access to birth control in the first place, says Adshade, and the physical, economic and emotional toll that having children takes specifically on mothers is well established.

"I'm fascinated personally by this kind of societal myth that we have that women throughout all time immemorial have just been desperate to become mothers, and that men are resistant to parenthood," said Adshade, who is also the author of Dollars and Sex: How Economics Influences Sex and Love.

"This is a very, very strange perspective because children have always been an enormous amount of work for women."

The new Pew poll didn't get into the specific reasons why more men than women said they wanted to have children, but it did note that pressure from the respondents' own parents to start a family wasn't a factor. 

"Among young adults without children, men are more inclined than women to express a desire for parenthood in the future. Yet, there is no noticeable difference between genders when it comes to aspirations to marry," said lead researcher Carolina Aragão in an email statement provided to CBC News.

The results are based on an Oct. 24 to Nov. 5, 2023 poll of 1,495 U.S. adults aged 18-34 with at least one living parent, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.3 percentage points. 

The Pew results mirror data on fertility intentions from other studies going back decades.

In 1990, when Statistics Canada first started reporting on