“I’d Leave If I Could”: Why So Many Young Women Want To Leave The U.S. Right Now

The fantasy starts in a group chat.

A friend sends a TikTok about moving to Portugal or Montréal. Someone else replies with that tired line about “the American dream,” then adds a skull emoji. No one believes the flights will actually get booked. Everyone understands the subtext: this country feels hostile, and the exit door lives rent-free in our heads.

Gallup just put numbers on that feeling, and the numbers look like a warning flare.

In 2025, 40% of women ages 15 to 44 say they would leave the U.S. permanently if they could, according to Gallup. That same question in 2014 got 10%. The desire has quadrupled over the past decade. It holds steady across Trump and Biden. It does not calm down when the “good guy” wins. It keeps climbing.

The poll is about desire, not plane tickets. Which means younger women just rewrote the social contract in their imaginations. The country gave them one story. Their answer sounds more like: “Thank you, next.“

When women want to leave the U.S., it’s about more than a passport stamp

Gallup finds that about one in five Americans now say they would like to leave the U.S. and move permanently to another country if they could, for the second year in a row. That overall number stays high regardless of who sits in the White House.

Younger women drive the spike. Among women aged 15 to 44, 40% say they would move abroad if given the opportunity, according to Gallup. Ten years ago, they looked like everyone else in the data. Today, they sit 21 points above men in the same age group. Gallup says no other country in its World Poll has ever recorded a gender gap that wide for this question.

Furthermore, one in five Americans wants to leave. Younger women lead that wave and now express a stronger desire to move than their peers in other wealthy OECD countries. The spike started in 2016, before Trump even took office, and continued through Biden, as women grappled with the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

This is not a mood swing. It looks like a long argument with the country itself.

The numbers behind why women want to leave the U.S.

The Gallup chart tells a clean story. Younger women’s desire to migrate jumped in 2016, during the last year of Barack Obama’s second term, after both parties settled on nominees and the country braced for Trump versus Clinton. The line keeps rising during Trump’s first term. It dips a bit under Biden. Then it rises again in 2025, the first year of Trump’s second term.

Gallup notes that this pattern points to “a broader shift in opinion among younger women, rather than a solely partisan one.” At the same time, politics shapes the edges. In 2025, Gallup found a 25-point gap between Americans who approve of the country’s leadership and those who do not when asked about migration. Under previous presidents, that gap stayed in the single digits or low teens. Under Trump’s second term, it exploded.

Party ID tracks right behind it. Gallup reports that in 2025, 59% of women aged 18 to 44 identify as or lean Democratic. Their male counterparts in that age range sit at 39%. Older women come in at 53%. Older men sit at 37%. The group that feels least represented by the current power structure is also the one that fantasizes most about leaving.

Where would they go? Gallup says younger American women keep circling the same answer. Canada tops the list, with 11% naming it as their preferred destination in recent years. New Zealand, Italy, and Japan appear next at 5% each.

Canada is not just maple leaves and universal healthcare. In this data, it reads like a symbol: a country similar enough to feel legible, but with a different relationship to guns, pregnancy, and the word “solidarity.”

Younger women want to leave the U.S., and their trust in institutions already left

Underneath the migration fantasies sits something colder.

Gallup uses a National Institutions Index that blends confidence in the national government, the military, the courts, and the honesty of elections. In 2015, women aged 15 to 44 scored 57 on that index. By 2025, their score drops by 17 points. Gallup says no other demographic group experiences a decline that steep. The fall happens during both the Trump and Biden administrations.

The courts take the biggest hit. Gallup reports that younger women’s confidence in the judicial system fell from 55% in 2015 to 32% in 2025. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion, likely helped carve that canyon. Gallup notes that the desire to migrate had already started climbing before Dobbs, so the ruling did not create the trend. It sharpened it.

On Reddit, women fill in the emotional footnotes. One commenter writes about a doctor who forced her to take a pregnancy test before a potentially life-saving scan, “even though there’s no way I was pregnant and that even if I was I would want the scan anyway.” She connects that moment to debt, stagnant pay, and the fear of medical bankruptcy. Another woman writes, “We are not safe or valued. Our daughters are not and will be valued or safe.”

None of these posts mentions the Gallup index. They just describe what it feels like when that number slides.

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When women want to leave the U.S., they talk about bodies, money, and boredom with fear

Scroll through the Reddit thread under the Gallup story, and it reads like a late-night group chat that lost its patience.

People mention the “dark turn” in reproductive rights. They point to states that “enthusiastically” block life-saving care in pregnancy. They talk about the cost of childcare, the lack of paid family leave, and the price of a hospital birth. One user says she got offered employer insurance that “doesn’t cover childbirth at all or hospital emergencies.”

Others bring up the culture around all of that. Commenters reference “toxic red pill culture,” men who openly discuss taking away women’s right to vote, and a president who “doesn’t care about you.” One person writes that American women watch “a man who bragged about sexually assaulting women on tape be elected to president TWICE” and then get told the country is still “the greatest in the world.”

On the other side, skeptics show up. Some call the responses “emotional, naive,” and argue that many women would have fewer rights in parts of Asia, Africa, or Latin America. Others insist that polls reflect “directional anger,” not actual suitcases. One commenter says flatly, “These women view Gallup like an Instagram poll. They ain’t going anywhere and that’s good because we need them to vote.”

Between those poles, another pattern emerges. A few users quietly say they have already left. Others say they are preparing paperwork. One writes, “Even if only 1% of the people who said yes in this poll actually do leave, that’s still a massive brain drain.” That sentence lands heavier than any meme about Canada.

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Desire is data too: when women want to leave the U.S., they test the door

Gallup stresses that its question measures desire, not concrete plans. The organization notes that previous research shows “not everyone who wants to move will move.” That sounds obvious until you remember how often people use that line to dismiss the anger behind the fantasy.

Desire still matters. It maps which doors people check, which futures they imagine for their kids, which careers they choose. If 40% of younger women say they would like to leave, that means 40% of younger women can picture a life elsewhere in vivid enough detail to answer “yes” to a stranger on the phone.

Gallup also finds that the usual mobility rules are starting to bend. Among women 18 to 44, the desire to migrate used to align with the freedom on paper. Single, child-free women answered “yes” more than married women or mothers. In 2024 and 2025, that changes. At least two in five younger women tell Gallup they would like to move abroad permanently “regardless of marital status.” The poll shows 41% of younger married women and 45% of younger single women saying they want to go.

Children do not erase the fantasy either. Gallup reports that 40% of younger women with children at home say they would like to leave the U.S. for good. Among those without children, 44% say the same. Gallup suggests that if even some of these women follow through, “it is likely that they would take the next generation with them.”

In policy language: future population loss. In plain language, that is a woman looking at her kid and thinking, “You deserve somewhere safer than this.”

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Younger women want to leave the U.S., but many stay trapped in the fine print

Here is the part that few glossy headlines touch. Leaving a country is hard.

You need money, language skills, degrees that transfer, and passports without complications. You need a job offer or a points-based visa. You need to clear immigration systems run by governments that grew more cautious, not less, after the pandemic and the rise of far-right parties in Europe.

Reddit users push this point too. One commenter reminds everyone that economics, family ties, and legal requirements form “hurdles too big for most to overcome.” Another asks how many respondents have ever lived abroad. Someone else points out that a global housing crisis waits on the other side of customs.

So what does it mean when millions of women tell Gallup they want to leave, knowing all of that? It implies the fantasy stays rational even when the logistics do not. It exposes a sense that the American bargain feels rigged: high tuition, high healthcare costs, erratic gun laws, courts that shrink bodily autonomy, and a political climate where the most powerful voices asking women to have children offer the thinnest safety net for those children once they arrive.

The fantasy of leaving says: If I could opt out, I would. The fact that many cannot says something even darker about choice.

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If women want to leave the U.S., what does the country offer to make them stay?

One Reddit user asks the real question: “What does the U.S. do for young women that makes them want to stay? What do young women get out of the American social contract?”

The Gallup data does not answer that. It measures the urge to walk, not the reasons to stay. But you can sketch out the tradeoffs from the comments and the numbers. Higher salaries in some fields. Stronger job markets in tech, medicine, and media. Social capital is built in cities where friends, partners, and parents already live. The comfort of familiar chaos.

For many women, especially daughters of immigrants or women of color, there is also a sense of double exposure. They grew up watching their parents chase this country as a refuge from dictatorships, economic collapse, or actual war. They know exactly how bad it can look elsewhere. So their desire to leave is not nostalgia for some European fantasy. It is a grounded comparison. They read statistics on maternal mortality, gun deaths, police violence, and social benefits. They listen to presidents, judges, and influencers talk about their bodies like public property.

Gallup closes its report on a sober note. Younger American women, it says, “increasingly lack faith in national institutions and picture their futures beyond America’s borders.”

That is the real headline. The country can ignore the fantasy and tell women they live in a “bubble.” It can argue about how many will actually go. It can repeat the old slogan about being “the greatest” and hope that repetition still works.

Or it can take seriously what it means when a whole generation of women looks at the exit sign and, for the first time, believes the door might open.