Male homemakers could be inspiring young women to achieve higher career goals, according to a new study at the University of Arizona.

When young women believe more men are becoming stay-at-home dads, there’s a greater chance they imagine themselves as primary breadwinners for their future families, researchers say.

On the flip side, when they think men’s roles in society aren’t changing, they are more likely to consider themselves destined for a life of primary caregiving.

“This shows how dependent women’s role choices can be on their expectations of their future male partners,” says lead study author Alyssa Croft, an assistant professor in the UA department of psychology.

“Those expectations could have implications for what women are willing and able to do in their own lives.”

Croft asked single female college students, aged 18 to 25, to write about how they imagined their lives 15 years in the future.

They were presented with identical fact sheets for topics such as smoking rates, vegetable consumption and the increase in stay-at-home dads.

But the data they were shown on dads was different: some were shown graphs with a sharp increase, others saw graphs that flatlined.

The results of the study correlated with who saw which data.

“These are the [college students] who we would think might be most likely to balk at traditional gender stereotypes, and yet they’re still showing this pattern of role expectations that is in direct response to what they believe men will be or will not be doing,” Croft says.

“Could it be that women are picturing, before they’re even in a relationship, a very stereotypic division of labor in their future families? And does that affect the education and career decisions they make when they’re young?”

A definitive number of stay-at-home dads is hard to pinpoint since the US Census Bureau doesn’t track such things yet. The most recent data comes found from 2013 Pew Research report, which found that “2 million U.S. fathers with children in their household were not working outside the home…” But, as Forbes points out, this doesn’t prove these pops were actually caregiving for the kids.

On the other end of the parental spectrum, the numbers are stack up: the Center for American Progress breadwinning moms are increasingly the norm in America, reporting that “42 percent of mothers were sole or primary breadwinners, bringing in at least half of family earnings. Nearly another one-quarter of mothers (22.4 percent) were co-breadwinners, bringing home from 25 percent to 49 percent of earnings for their families. This represents an increase over previous years and is the continuation of a long-running trend, as women’s earnings and economic contributions to their families continue to grow in importance.”