- Record numbers of young American women say they want to permanently move abroad. Gallup finds 40% of women aged 15–44 say they would live in another country if given the chance — more than double the amount of young men who say the same and the largest gender gap Gallup has ever recorded.
- Young American women are far more likely to want to emigrate than their counterparts in other wealthy countries, and desire to leave is significantly higher among those who disapprove of President Donald Trump.
- The shift began around 2016 and has accelerated, Gallup found. The percentage of young women wanting to move has quadrupled since 2014, coinciding with declining confidence in U.S. institutions, especially the judicial system.
- Family status doesn’t significantly change the pattern. Married women and mothers are almost as likely as single women and those without children to say they would leave.
Record numbers of young women say they would like to permanently leave the U.S. and live in another country if given the opportunity, a trend that young women in other countries generally do not share, Gallup recently discovered.
Gallup reported that 40% of young American women aged 15 to 44 say they would leave the country, compared with 19% of men in the same age group. The disparity between men and women’s responses is the widest Gallup has ever recorded on the question. No other country in the world has such a large gender gap in its responses to moving abroad.
Young men’s desire to permanently live in a different country has remained relatively stable in recent years. Across the past decade, however, the number of young women who say they would move abroad for good quadrupled. Gallup reported that 10% of women wanted to live abroad in 2014, but that figure was similar to those from other age groups. In 2025, only 14% of women aged 45 or older say they would move to another country.
The pollster reports that along with age and gender, political affiliation seems to influence a desire to move abroad. Nearly three in five young women aged 18 to 44 identify as or lean Democrat, and Gallup found that 29% of young women who currently disapprove of the country’s leadership want to move. Only 4% of young women who approve of President Donald Trump say they also wish to live in a different country.
Gallup noted that for years, young women in other wealthy countries have not been showing similar desires to permanently move abroad, with an average of 20-30% saying they would like to live in a different country. The pollster also found that in the 2000s and early 2010s, young American women were less likely than women in other countries to say they wanted to leave their home country, but the trend changed around 2016.
Gallup also discovered that young women do not believe their marital status would influence their decision to move abroad permanently. In 2025, 41% of married young women said they would like to move to another country if given the chance, and 45% of single women said the same. Similarly, women with children were only slightly less likely than those without children to say they would move abroad permanently — 40% vs. 44%.
“Were these women to follow through on their desire to migrate, it is likely that they would take the next generation with them,” Gallup reported.
Gallup found that young women have experienced a large drop in confidence in U.S. institutions — particularly the judicial system — across the past decade, significantly more than men or older women. In 2015, young women scored 57 on Gallup’s National Institutions Index, but currently register at 40. Older women and young men experienced much smaller shifts, while older men’s confidence grew 15 points across the same time frame. Gallup hypothesized that the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 was a major contributor to young women’s distrust in U.S. institutions.
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