More Young Women Are Living at Home with Mom and Dad

The percentage of young women living at home with parents or relatives has risen to its highest level since 1940. More millennial women are putting off marriage and attending college, and they face high living expenses.

A Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data finds that 36.4 percent of women between the ages 18 and 34 lived with parents or relatives in 2014. That's the most since at least 1940, when 36.2 percent lived with family.

But Richard Fry, a senior economist at Pew says, it's a very different world for women now, despite the ``return to the past, statistically speaking.''

Fry says young women are staying home now because they are half as likely to be married as they were in 1940 and much more likely to be college-educated. Other economic forces, such as increasing student debt, higher living costs and economic uncertainty, are also playing a role.

Young men have historically lived with parents at higher rates than young women, and similar economic and cultural forces have kept an increasing number of men at home too in recent years.