A quiet Gallup chart just dropped a loud cultural bomb.
According to Gallup researchers Benedict Vigers and Julie Ray, a record 40% of American women aged 15 to 44 now say they’d like to leave the U.S. permanently if they could.
Among men the same age, that number is just 19%.
On The Charlie Kirk Show, guest Libby Emmons told hosts Andrew Kolvet and Blake Neff that these women are “out of their minds” and don’t realize how good they have it in the United States.
The whole conversation turned into a debate over feminism, happiness, Trump, and what women have been promised versus what they actually feel.
The numbers say one thing.
The commentary says another.
Together, they paint a pretty uneasy picture of where young America is headed.
Gallup Finds A Stunning Gender Gap
In their Gallup analysis, Benedict Vigers and Julie Ray explain that younger women’s desire to migrate has quadrupled in about a decade.
Back in 2014, only 10% of women aged 15 to 44 said they’d like to leave the U.S. permanently. That’s about where everyone else was too — men, older women, older men. Nothing remarkable.
By 2025, that jumped to 40%.
Younger men did not move in the same way. Vigers and Ray say just 19% of men 15 to 44 now say they’d like to leave. That 21-point gap between young women and young men is the largest Gallup has ever recorded for the U.S., and one of the biggest gaps they’ve seen anywhere in the world since they started asking this question in 2007.
What’s striking is that Gallup doesn’t ask, “Are you packing your bags?”
They ask if you would like to move permanently “if you could.” It’s about imagination more than airline tickets. But if tens of millions of younger women are mentally picturing their future somewhere else, that says something heavy about how they feel in their own country.
Vigers and Ray also compare U.S. women to women in other wealthy nations. Across 38 OECD countries, younger women’s desire to migrate usually sits between 20% and 30%. For a long time, American women were less likely than that average to want to leave.
Around 2016, that flipped.
Now, younger American women are more likely than their peers in other rich countries to say they’d rather live somewhere else. Younger American men, by contrast, are still less likely than average to want to migrate.
Politics, Institutions, And The 2016 Turning Point
Gallup’s timeline doesn’t line up neatly with one president or one party.
Vigers and Ray say the first big jump came in 2016, the end of Barack Obama’s second term, after the presidential nominees were basically locked in and before Donald Trump actually took office. Desire to leave kept climbing during Trump’s first term and stayed high into Joe Biden’s presidency.
So this isn’t just “I hate Trump so I’m leaving.”
At the same time, Vigers and Ray note that migration desire has become much more politicized. In 2025, there’s a 25-point gap between Americans who approve of the country’s leadership and those who disapprove when it comes to wanting to leave.
Between 2008 and 2016, that gap didn’t really exist.
It first jumps after Trump’s election in 2017, averages around 14 points during his first term, shrinks under Biden, and then spikes to 25 points again in 2025, Trump’s second term. Younger women are also much more likely to lean Democratic — Gallup says 59% of women 18 to 44 identify with or lean toward Democrats, compared with 39% of men in that age group.
So you have a group that leans left, feels alienated by leadership, and increasingly doesn’t trust institutions.
Vigers and Ray point out that younger women’s confidence in national institutions – government, military, courts, and elections – has fallen more sharply than any other group over the past decade. Their “National Institutions Index” score dropped 17 points between 2015 and 2025.
Confidence in the judicial system in particular fell from 55% to 32% among younger women.
Gallup notes the Dobbs decision in 2022, which overturned Roe v. Wade, may have fueled that drop in trust in the courts, even though the desire to migrate was already climbing before Dobbs. It’s more like Dobbs poured gasoline on a fire that was already burning.
Marriage, Kids, And The Next Generation
Gallup usually finds that people most likely to say “I want to move” are the ones with the most mobility – younger, unmarried, no kids.
But Vigers and Ray say something different is happening with younger American women.
Among women 18 to 44, both married and unmarried women now express high levels of desire to leave. In 2024–2025, 41% of married younger women and 45% of single younger women say they’d like to move abroad permanently if they could. That’s the smallest gap Gallup has ever measured between married and single younger women on this question.
In the same way, having children doesn’t seem to be acting as much of a brake as you might think.
Gallup reports that 40% of younger women with children at home want to leave the U.S. for good, compared with 44% of those without children. The difference is small. If those women ever followed through, they wouldn’t be leaving alone — they’d be taking kids, and really, the next generation’s future, with them.
On one level, that’s just a statistic. On another, it’s a quiet vote of no confidence in what the country will look like for their children.
Kolvet, Neff, And Emmons Ask: What Are These Women Thinking?
On The Charlie Kirk Show, Andrew Kolvet and Blake Neff reacted to the same Gallup numbers and brought on Libby Emmons, editor-in-chief of The Post Millennial, to unpack them.
Kolvet opens by highlighting that 20% of all Americans say they’d like to live somewhere else, but that the big story is the 40% of women aged 15 to 44 who want to leave. Neff points out that men in the same age range don’t share that impulse nearly as much.
Emmons does not tiptoe around her reaction.
She tells Kolvet and Neff that these women “are out of their minds” and “have no idea the bounty of conveniences and food and freedoms and peace that we have here in this country.” In her view, the problem isn’t America – it’s how America has been sold to its own youth.
Emmons argues that schools and culture have been drenched in cultural relativism, teaching young people that all cultures are essentially the same. She insists American culture “is the greatest one,” and says we’ve done “a really, really bad job” of actually telling young people what’s good about their homeland compared with everywhere else.
The hosts joke that a lot of women just “want to be Emily in Paris,” chasing a fantasy version of Europe. Emmons points to viral videos of women who actually moved abroad — to places like Africa or Costa Rica – and then came back online to admit it wasn’t the paradise they imagined, especially when they saw real poverty up close.
From their angle, the Gallup numbers aren’t proof that America is failing women.
They’re proof that a lot of women have been misled about what life is really like elsewhere, and haven’t been properly taught what they already have.
Careers, Feminism And The “Dog That Caught The Car”
Kolvet and Neff also bring up a related data point: women in America are doing well by many conventional measures.
They mention that women are more likely to complete college, increasingly likely to buy homes on their own, and often benefit from what Neff describes as a kind of informal affirmative action in academia, tech, and medicine. Institutions have spent years trying to recruit more women and open doors.
So why, they ask, are so many young women still fantasizing about leaving?
Emmons offers a blunt theory.
She says American women are like “the dog that caught the car.” They demanded power, equality, and access – and in many ways, they got it. But then some of them end up in their 40s with “a killer career,” no kids, no partner, “a mountain of stuff,” and a feeling that none of it actually satisfies them.
She contrasts the shiny career life with “a bundle of grandbabies to snuggle with,” arguing that women are wired with maternal instincts that our current culture pushes them to suppress.
To back that up, Kolvet and Neff reference data discussed in The Atlantic showing that liberal women are the least likely to report being completely satisfied with life, while conservative women are far more likely to say they’re happy.
They use that as evidence that the current “you can have it all, just like a man” script might be leaving many women emptier than expected.
Later in the show, Emmons goes further and talks about what she calls the “medicalization of womanhood” – from birth control, to antidepressants, to fertility treatments, to medicated menopause. She thinks this constant pharmacological management is adding to women’s unhappiness.
She also blames what she sees as the emasculation of men. As women earn more and take more leadership roles, she says, men slide into more traditionally “feminine” roles, like stay-at-home dads. In her view, many women are simply not attracted to that dynamic and end up dissatisfied with the men available to them.
Taken together, Kolvet, Neff and Emmons read the Gallup numbers not as a referendum on America’s failures alone, but as the outcome of decades of cultural messaging about equality, power, and what a “successful” woman should want – a script they think doesn’t match how many women actually feel.
What The Numbers And Narratives Miss
Both Benedict Vigers and Julie Ray on one side, and Andrew Kolvet, Blake Neff and Libby Emmons on the other, are catching different pieces of the same storm.
Gallup’s data tells us something simple and hard to ignore: younger American women are losing faith in institutions and imagining their futures somewhere else in record numbers, while younger men, especially in the U.S., are comparatively more rooted and less eager to leave.
The Charlie Kirk Show conversation adds an emotional and cultural layer — frustration that so many women seem ungrateful, concern that feminism overshot its mark, and a belief that careers, pills, and politics have crowded out family and meaning.
But there are a few things worth keeping in mind.
First, as Vigers and Ray stress, Gallup is measuring desire, not plans. Saying “I’d leave if I could” can be a way of expressing exhaustion, fear, or disappointment, not an actual vote to abandon ship. It’s like telling a friend, “Man, I’d move to the woods tomorrow,” after a brutal work week.
Second, not all younger women are reacting for the same reasons. Some might be angry about Dobbs and reproductive rights. Some might be burned out by career pressure.
Some might be worried about political instability, gun violence, or the cost of raising kids. “40%” is one number, but behind it are very different personal stories.
Third, the fact that younger men are far less likely to say they want out suggests that men and women are experiencing the same country very differently. That could be about safety, about workplace dynamics, about family expectations, or about politics. The Gallup data doesn’t fully answer that – it only warns us the gap is real.
If there’s one thing both sets of sources quietly agree on, it’s this: something in the American story isn’t landing with younger women anymore.
Gallup shows the drift in cold percentages.
Kolvet, Neff, and Emmons argue over who lied, who misled, and what women are really built for.
What’s clear is that if 40% of your young women are at least daydreaming about a life somewhere else, the problem isn’t just “complaining.” It’s a signal that the social contract – between citizens and institutions, between promises and reality – is fraying most where the future is supposed to be strongest.
Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, John developed a love for the great outdoors early on. With years of experience as a wilderness guide, he’s navigated rugged terrains and unpredictable weather patterns. John is also an avid hunter and fisherman who believes in sustainable living. His focus on practical survival skills, from building shelters to purifying water, reflects his passion for preparedness. When he’s not out in the wild, you can find him sharing his knowledge through writing, hoping to inspire others to embrace self-reliance.
