Disappointing news. The latest salvo in the “move aside, liberalism, you’re so over” moment has landed. Now we are supposed to entertain the idea that the next generation wants us to return to the fictional Connecticut suburb of Stepford, where men have jobs and a life and women shop for groceries and keep the house looking nice. This can’t be right, can it?

Yet unfortunately, judging from academic reports, it looks as if there is hard evidence for a sweeping change in attitudes in both genders. Young women are losing faith with equality at the same rate as young men. At this point, fellow liberals may want to pause to weep into a pot of hemp tea, brewed lovingly by an equal partner.

A series of new reports suggests that young people aged 18-32 (in this case, in the United States, but in line with trends elsewhere) are becoming increasingly convinced by the idea that it would be “much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family”.

It’s the words “much better for everyone involved” that I find particularly distressing for some reason. They have the ring of the capitulation Betty Friedan described in The Feminine Mystique, a kind of surrender that was traditionally best treated with Librium, Valium and strict observance of “gin o’clock”. Younger sisters: believe me, you don’t want this. I understand the lure of the siren call, but it must be resisted. No one is going to look after you apart from yourself. It’s an illusion.

These new studies by the Council on Contemporary Families (“a non-profit, non-partisan organisation dedicated to providing the latest research about American families”) describe this change in attitudes as “an intriguing puzzle”. “Starting in the mid-1970s, youth increasingly supported equal sharing of housework and decision-making at home. But in the mid-1990s, the trend towards equality reversed course.” Whoa. Back up. The mid-1990s? That’s 20 years ago. And you’re saying it has only got worse since then?

Sociologists have been observing this trend in younger men for a while (“Do Millennial Men Want Stay-At-Home Wives?”). The finding on women is relatively new and backed up by the General Social Survey (an annual study of political and cultural attitudes). One study traces this change back to 2004, with a paper that reported students of both genders were tending to disagree less and less with the statement: “It is better if a man works and a woman takes care of the home.”

This is what academics call “the stalled gender revolution”. It is equal opportunities backwards-travel. Excuse me while I go and find a 1950s cardigan to put on because I am now feeling rather chilly. Because once women give up on equality, we are doomed.

It gets yet worse. This trend is becoming more pronounced the younger the respondents. Another section of the report shows that “fewer of the youngest millennials, those aged 18 to 25, support egalitarian family arrangements than did the same age group 20 years earlier”. In 1994, 83% of young men rejected the idea of a male breadwinner. In 2014, only 55% rejected it. And what about young women? All the graphs show that they support equality more than the men of their age (phew), but their support is declining at exactly the same rate as the men’s (sorry, the phew was premature). The New York Times has already identified this as one of the factors in Hillary Clinton’s failure.

The reports themselves are almost worse than some of the handwringing coverage they have already inspired, which credits Brexit and Trump as being symptoms of the problem. The Council on Contemporary Families talks about “masculinity backlash” and “cultural panic”. It reports that women with higher earnings than men are increasingly seen as a “threat”. Women are almost as likely as men to report these views.

This is being presented as a liberal catastrophe. But let’s not forget that this is what young people say they want. It’s not what they are actually doing. (That’s a whole load of other studies.) It feels more like an exercise in wish-fulfilment on the part of a generation who have not had the opportunities they saw offered to those older than them. And who can blame them? They see what has and hasn’t worked in their parents’ lives. They see how older generations were able to acquire property and jobs more easily. They wish they had something stable to fall back on.

With our recent political climate, it’s obvious that British liberals can’t be smug about this either. The US reports state that these views can be “entirely explained” by the “absence of policies supporting work-family balance” (very little maternity provision, hardly any holidays, an increasingly precarious job market).

That isn’t so much our problem in the UK (although we could also do better in these areas). But what we share is an inability to counter the disconnect with what young people are told is the right way to live your life and how they see things playing out in reality.

Certainly, feminism’s refusal to debate “choice feminism” has played a role here. It has been very difficult for people to reconcile the idea that, if you’re a woman, anything you choose must be feminist by virtue of the fact that you are a woman. We haven’t found a way of talking about these things without judging other people’s choices and finding them wanting (something people, quite rightly, can’t stomach).

There must be another way, though, other than returning to the breadwinner/homemaker dream of days gone by, an ideal that many argue never properly existed anyway and was in itself an advertising construct. (Because, throughout history, women have worked and raised children, whether they were paid for the work or not.)

Meanwhile, I can’t help thinking that American millennials of both genders might like to adopt the anthem currently ringing out on the national tour of The Pub Landlord, Al Murray: “Let’s Go Backwards Together.” Is it some small consolation that both genders will have each other for company on this retrograde journey? Not really. More hemp tea, please. Spike it this time.