An ideological gap is opening up between young men and women around the world, according to a series of recent polls and studies. The headlines have been alarming:  “Young men are turning their backs on feminism”. “Gen Z is two generations, not one”. “The ideological gap between younger men and women is becoming a chasm”.

For this first edition of The Evidence, we wanted to look into this trend. What does the data show? Should we be as worried about it as these headlines imply? What implications does the ideological gender gap have for policy and what can we, as individuals, do about it?

The story started with a Business Insider piece focusing on US data, which indicated that women aged 18-30 are more liberal than their male contemporaries by an enormous 30 percentage points. The Financial Times then took up the baton, looking into social survey data across the world and finding similar divides in the UK, Germany, Poland, Tunisia, China and South Korea (where the biggest ideological divide of all is found). Writing for The Conversation, Intifar Chowdhury sees evidence of a similar trend in Australian data.

In most countries, the divide seems to be mostly caused by young women becoming more progressive. Young men, on the whole, seem to be staying the same, or becoming slightly more conservative (South Korea, where men are becoming much more conservative, is an exception).

Recent UK research also shows a growing divide in Gen Z’s views on gender equality, with young women and men becoming less likely to agree on whether it is harder to be a man or woman. While older generations are more likely to see little difference between men’s and women’s experiences, 68% of women aged 16-29 believe it’s harder to be a woman, compared to 35% of young men. And while one in four young men think men have it tougher than women, the same is true of only one in six men over 60. To put it another way, grandfathers are more likely to understand the consequences of gender inequality than their grandsons. Previous research found a related pattern across Europe, with young men found to be the most likely to perceive advances in women’s rights as a threat to men’s opportunities. Similar trends have been observed in Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Spain.

A cultural schism 

While in some cases there is evidence of a direct link between increasing conservatism on gender issues with voting for the far right, this isn’t nearly enough to explain the ideological data gap. In most countries, a minority of young men are shifting to the right. Focusing on this is therefore a dangerous line to toe. Being less liberal than their female counterparts doesn’t
necessarily mean young men are against gender equality, and multiple researchers have cautioned against understanding this purely as a backlash against feminism, as many commentators are doing.

In fact, we actually find record levels of acceptance of the need for gender equality in many countries. For example, in that same UK study, although more young than old men thought feminism has done more harm than good, in both cases they were a minority: most thought that gender equality has been good for society. Overall, support for gender equality is rising, not falling.

So what is causing this ideological shift – if not a backlash against feminism?

The most in-depth exploration of the topic I’ve seen comes from Dr Alice Evans, a Visiting Fellow at Stanford who is currently writing a book on the “great gender divergence”. She argues that gendered ideological polarisation appears to be encouraged by economic resentment as well as by young men and women existing in different cultural spheres. She explains this latter trend by the increasing breadth of cultural output by women from Taylor Swift to Bernardine Evaristo, social media bubbles, and the extremist content of misogynist influencers such as Andrew Tate. She also cites the decrease in young men and women socialising together offline – a trend that has been observed in many of the same countries where the ideological gap is found.

I delved into this further in a conversation with Dr Gefjon Off, a researcher at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, who published one of the first papers on this phenomenon in 2022. She and her colleagues pored through research covering 32,469 people across all 27 EU countries, looking for factors that might explain modern sexist attitudes. Their finding that young men were by far the most likely group to perceive advances in women’s rights as a threat to men’s opportunities was, at that point, a big surprise (and not what they had been looking for). Even more surprising was that this trend held across all 27 countries.

It’s this data on which Evans bases her suggestion that economic resentment has a part to play. Off and her colleagues found that the areas where young men lived had a strong effect on whether they were opposed to women’s rights or not, with young men in regions with increasing unemployment and low trust in public institutions particularly likely to be opposed to women’s rights. Such conditions of limited economic or social mobility seem to promote ‘zero sum thinking’: the idea that one person’s gain is another’s loss – or women’s rights coming at the expense of opportunities for men.

Off’s current research factors in how much time people spend on social media to the analysis. Preliminary results (yet to be published), show an effect for young men, with a higher amount of time spent on social media correlating with perceiving women’s rights as threatening.

“I do think social media plays a role,” she told me. “But it must be more like a catalyst or trigger for people who already have some kind of predisposition to buy into this kind of stuff. The algorithm plays this content to basically everyone who is a young man. And so lots of young men receive it and don’t buy into it.”

‘We’ve lost them’

How worried should we be? Off said: “I wouldn’t be too alarmist. I think this is an important trend. But it’s not like these young men are against everything that feminism has ever fought for. It really depends on the question and how you ask it.”

In schools, girls tend to do better than boys. More women than men attend university. In entry level roles in the workplace, young men aren’t likely to see a massive difference in their treatment compared to women – the gender gap widens the higher up the ladder you climb. It’s possible that many young men are simply not exposed to an understanding of how modern sexism operates. And let’s not forget that this is a time when insecurity is all too common. In such a context, there is far more opportunity for sexist narratives to take hold. Spending more time online does indeed seem to be an important factor.

The same trend seems to be found in Latin America. Ariana Pérez Coutado, one of the authors of a report looking into the views of young people in Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Spain, told me: “Unfortunately, the education they receive in schools is not deep enough for young people to fully understand why certain behaviours are reprehensible. Young males simply feel blamed without truly understanding why.”

All this tallies with the suggestion that the problem is that young men feel threatened, not that they oppose women’s advancement. Meanwhile, gendered cultural bubbles give young men and women different perspectives on the nature of their current hardships. This would also explain why in the US and UK, there isn’t actually much difference between young people’s values or policy positions as opposed to political party identification.

“I feel like we kind of lost them in this recent mobilisation,” Off says, referring to the #MeToo movement. “We really need to get those young men on board and get them to understand that first of all, we don’t hate them. Second, that it’s fine if they’re insecure. So are we all! But also, please understand that gender inequality is still a thing. And that they will also benefit from more gender equality.”

Research Round-up

Here’s what else is making the news in gender inequality research:

1. 📖 A new study looking at 1,255 English language school textbooks from 34 countries has found women and girls occur less frequently, are portrayed as more passive, are less likely to be associated with work or achievement, and are more likely to be associated with the home.
2. 🪴 New data shows that just 34% of delegates at last December’s COP28 were women, the same percentage as ten years ago. Less than one in five heads of delegation (19%) was a woman.
3. 🏳️‍⚧️ In the first national study of its kind, researchers found that trans people in England are up to five times as likely to have
   long-term poor mental health compared with cis groups, and far more likely to report their mental health needs unmet by healthcare services. Meanwhile, a vast survey of over 90,000 trans people in the US found that 94% reported more life satisfaction after transitioning, despite facing discrimination.

Get in touch

This is the very first edition of The Evidence so we’d love to know what you think. Do you have any suggestions about format or content? What topics relating to research into gender equity are you particularly interested in hearing about? What insights would be particularly useful to you?

Our next edition will be out on March 25. Stay tuned!

About The Evidence

The Evidence is a brand new supplement to the Impact newsletter designed to help you understand gender inequality – and show how we might fix it. Impact is a weekly newsletter of feminist journalism, dedicated to the rights of women and gender-diverse people worldwide.

This is the English version of our newsletter; you can read the French one here.