In recent elections, women have voted more progressively than men. In the 2020 election, Pew Research reports that Joe Biden won by 11 points with women, while Donald Trump had a 2-point edge with men.
Through the lens of domestic politics, it’s easy to see why this might be the case. The Dobbs decision might not have been handed down at that point, but it was clear Trump’s stacking the court with radical conservatives had placed abortion rights in danger. Then there was Trump’s blatant misogyny, his disgusting comments, and the already pending suit from sexual assault survivor E. Jean Carroll.
However, the Financial Times reports that the political gap between men and women is a worldwide phenomenon. Not only this, they claim this schism is growing fast, and ripping the youngest generations apart.
But this crisis may not be exactly what it seems.
The gender gap in American politics is far from a new thing. As the Center for American Women and Politics shows, there was an 8-point difference between men and women in 1980. The closest the gap came to going away was in 1992 when Bill Clinton won with just a 4-point gender gap. Based on exit polling from Edison Research, the gender gap in 2020 may be the largest on record according to historical Edison data, but it’s not really extraordinary when compared to past cycles.
But that may not be the case in 2024.
The Survey Center on American Life (a project of the conservative American Enterprise Institute) shows a widening gap among attitudes of men and women. The most surprising aspect may be that this gap isn’t opening between older men reacting to a changing world and women pushing for change after a lifetime spent under a system that often severely restricted their options. It’s the youngest cohorts who are seeing the most extreme differences.
Political attitudes of young women and young men are reportedly shifting rapidly and in opposite directions. This, according to the article, is creating a political divide between genders around the world. One that threatens to do far more than just affect the outcome of elections.
Both the Survey Center on American Life and the Financial Times lay the principal blame for this phenomenon on the “MeToo” movement, with the FT calling it the “key trigger, giving rise to fiercely feminist values among young women who felt empowered to speak out against long-running injustices.” But it’s not quite as simple as women worldwide getting angry over social media messages, or men being upset because a bunch of Hollywood bosses finally ran into consequences for abuse they’d been getting away with for decades.
For one thing, the timing doesn’t quite line up with what we think of as MeToo. While the starting date for that movement is often set in 2006, it wasn’t until 2017 that the movement gained widespread attention in the United States and was covered by reporting around the world.
In some locations, the data shows that a gap between men and women opened decades before even the earliest date for MeToo. That’s the case in the United States, where a significant difference between women and men aged 18-29 developed between 1980 and 2000.
But based on the data presented, it seems clear that in the last five years, a yawning gap has emerged when it comes to the political positions of men and women in this age group.
The relationship between the events of MeToo—which were specifically about holding men accountable for using positions of power to commit rape or sexual assault while blackmailing women into silence—and these shifts in political alignment is not obvious. The election of Donald Trump and large-scale feminist protests happened around this same time. It seems clear that this was a point where women, and young women in particular, were pushing back hard against a patriarchal system that had not just restricted the options of women, but left them subject to physical abuse.
MeToo might not be the perfect label, but it does serve as a marker for a sea change in gender politics.
Some of the charts included in the Financial Times article at first appear dire, like this result from the United States.
However, while this may seem jaw-dropping at first, an examination of the scale shows that only a small percentage of young men share this concern. Only about 12% of men in the youngest cohort feel highly threatened by the empowerment of women. A very large majority of men of all ages do not agree with the statement. Also, since this appears to be a one-time measure, there’s no way to compare this with previous generations. It seems very possible that young men, still looking to build their careers and dealing with the awkwardness of their first serious relationships, might always have felt that women were … somewhat scary.
This isn’t the only issue that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. There appears to be a real difference, not just in voting in elections, but in how young men and young women respond to questions about a broad range of issues in many nations. That gap is growing fastest in countries like South Korea or China, where the empowerment of women represents an abrupt shift from a system that was much more rigid and confining than in America. But it doesn’t appear to be either as severe or as consequential, as the article suggests.
In the U.S. and Germany, the gap in conservatism and liberalism between men and women in the 18-29 age group is now about 30 points, with over half of that difference happening in the last six years. In South Korea, that gap is over 50 points, and the Financial Times associates this with some truly significant changes in South Korean society.
Korea’s is an extreme situation, but it serves as a warning to other countries of what can happen when young men and women part ways. Its society is riven in two. Its marriage rate has plummeted, and birth rate has fallen precipitously, dropping to 0.78 births per woman in 2022, the lowest of any country in the world.
That statement makes it seem like South Korea’s society has shifted hugely in the last six years, but that’s not the case. The birthrate in South Korea has been declining for decades. It dropped less quickly in the last six years than in several other recent periods and is projected to level out before beginning a slow rise. The low marriage rate is also part of a long-term trend, and the rate of decline since 2017 is about the same as the change in the seven years previous.
South Korea was not “riven in two” by the MeToo movement. Men and women there did not wake up in 2017 and start running in such opposite directions that it has caused some radical shifts in their society. Their marriage rates and birth rates are both low as the result of long-term trends that existed well before anyone said “me too.”
Still, based on the data from the Survey Center on American Life, there is a rapidly growing difference between young men and women when it comes to political issues. For example, here’s a chart on immigration issues in the U.K.
However, focusing on the gap between the positions of men and women seems to ignore the bigger picture: Both young men and young women started from positions that were already more progressive than any other age group. This doesn’t appear to be a case of young men becoming radically more conservative on this issue. In fact, young men are more progressive in their attitudes than any older group, including older women.
What this data shows isn’t two groups running in opposite directions. It shows that young women are becoming more progressive faster than young men.
A similar question in Germany appears to show young men drifting to a conservative position while young women have shifted more progressive than any other group. But again, the scale of the differences is so small, with every cohort providing an answer within a few percentage points, that it’s hard to tell what this says—especially as the charts don’t include a margin of error.
Many of the claims from the Survey Center on American Life data appear to be based on shifts of small percentages of those responding. It’s easy to make it appear that young women in Germany are four times more liberal than their male counterparts, so long as you leave out the information that this is looking at only 12% of total respondents.
The biggest change, and the only one that seems large enough to really make an impact, is that young women are shifting to a more progressive position than young men. If there’s a reactionary “they go left, so we go right” response from men, it’s not visible in what’s been presented. There’s also no indication that this political shift among women is affecting birth rates or marriage rates, not even in South Korea.
As much as the American Enterprise Institute might want to flog the idea that men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and Earth is getting ripped apart, there’s not a lot of evidence for it here. Other studies from nonpartisan sources have not found this supposedly growing divide.
And just to put a little sour icing on that cake, despite everything he had done and said, and despite multiple marches in the street, Trump actually improved his standing with women by 1% between to 2016 and 2020.
No chart is going to explain that one.
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