The Myth of the Gen Z Gender Divide

Judging by recent headlines, young men and women are more politically divided now than ever before. “A new global gender divide is emerging,” the Financial Times data journalist John Burn-Murdoch wrote in a widely cited January article. Burn-Murdoch’s analysis featured several eye-popping graphs that appeared to show a huge ideological rift opening up between young men and young women over the past decade. The implications—for politics, of course, but also for male-female relations and, by extension, the future of the species—were alarming. A New York Times opinion podcast convened to discuss, according to the episode title, “The Gender Split and the ‘Looming Apocalypse of the Developed World.’” The Washington Post editorial board warned, “If attitudes don’t shift, a political dating mismatch will threaten marriage.”

But nearly as quickly as the theory gained attention, it has come under scrutiny. “For every survey question where you can find a unique gender gap among the youngest age cohort, you can find many other questions where you don’t find that gap,” John Sides, a political-science professor at Vanderbilt University, told me. “Where we started with this whole conversation was that there’s this big thing happening; it’s happening worldwide. Then you just pick at it for a few minutes, and it becomes this really complex story.” Skeptics point out that, at least as far as the United States goes, the claims about a new gender divide rest on selective readings of inconclusive evidence. Although several studies show young men and women splitting apart, at least as many suggest that the gender gap is stable. And at the ballot box, the evidence of a growing divide is hard to find. The Gen Z war of the sexes, in other words, is probably not apocalyptic. It may not even exist at all.

The gender gap in voting—women to the left, men to the right—has been a fixture of American politics since at least the 1980 presidential election, when, according to exit polls, Ronald Reagan won 55 percent of male voters but only 47 of women.

Some evidence suggests that the divide has recently widened. In 2023, according to Gallup data, 18-to-29-year-old women were 15 percentage points more likely than men in the same age group to identify as liberal, compared with only seven points a decade ago. Young men’s ideology has remained more stable, but some surveys suggest that young white men in particular have been drifting rightward. The Harvard Youth Poll, for example, found that 33 percent of white men aged 18 to 24 identified as Republican in 2016, compared with 41 percent in 2023. This trend has begun appearing in new-voter-registration data as well, according to Tom Bonier, a Democratic political strategist. “Believe me, as a partisan Democrat, I would prefer that it’s not the case—but it appears to be true,” he told me. “We’re still generally arguing about if it’s happening, which to me is silly. The conversation hasn’t moved to why.”

[Ronald Brownstein: Is Gen Z coming for the GOP?]

Why indeed? Several factors present themselves for consideration. One is social-media-induced gender polarization. (Think misogynistic “manosphere” influencers and women who talk about how “all men are trash.”) Another, as always, is Donald Trump. Twenty-something-year-old women seemed repelled by Trump’s ascendance in 2016, John Della Volpe, who heads the Harvard Youth Poll, told me. They were much more likely to vote for Hillary Clinton. Then there’s the #MeToo movement, which emerged in 2017, soon after Trump took office. Daniel Cox, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a free-market-conservative think tank, argues that it durably shaped young women’s political consciousness. A 2022 poll found that nearly three-quarters of women under 30 say they support #MeToo, the highest of any age group. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade also seems to have been a turning point. Going into the 2022 midterm election, 61 percent of young women said abortion was a “critical” concern, according to a survey conducted by AEI. “Young women increasingly believe that what happens to any woman in the United States impacts their lives and experiences as well,” Cox told me. “That became really salient after Roe was overturned.” Gen Z women are more likely than Generation X or Baby Boomer women—though slightly less likely than Millennial women—to say that they have been discriminated against because of their gender at some point in their life.

Not so fast, say young men. Gen Z men are also more likely than older generations to say that they’ve been discriminated against based on gender. “There’s this kind of weird ping-pong going on between Gen Z men and women about who’s really struggling, who’s really the victim,” Richard Reeves, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me. Reeves, who founded the American Institute for Boys and Men, argues that although men still dominate the highest levels of society in the U.S., those on the lower rungs are doing worse than ever. They are far less likely than women to go to college or find a good job, and far more likely to end up in prison or dead. These young men feel—rightly, in Reeves’s view—that mainstream institutions and the Democratic Party haven’t addressed their problems. And, in the aftermath of #MeToo, some seem to believe that society has turned against men. Survey data indicate that Gen Z men are much less likely to identify as feminists than Millennial men are, and about as likely as middle-aged men. “I really do worry that we’re trending toward a bit of a women’s party and a men’s party in politics,” Reeves told me.

But if young men and women really were drifting apart politically, you would expect to see evidence on Election Day. And here’s where the theory starts showing cracks. The Cooperative Election Study, a national survey administered by YouGov, found that nearly 68 percent of 18-to-29-year-old men voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, compared with about 70 percent of women in that age group—the same percentage gap as in 2008. (The split was larger—nearly seven points—in 2016, when Trump’s personal behavior toward women was especially salient.) Catalist, a progressive firm that models election results based on voter-file data, found that the gender divide was roughly the same for all age groups in recent elections. In the 2022 midterms, according to Pew’s analysis of validated voters, considered the gold standard of postelection polling, the youngest voters had the smallest gender divide, and overwhelmingly supported Democrats.

[R]ichard V. Reeves: Redshirt the boys

Many of the polls that show a widening gender divide ask about ideology. But research shows that many people don’t have a clear idea of what the labels mean. Gallup, whose data partly inspired the gender-gap frenzy, notes that only about half of Democrats identify as liberal. Ten percent describe themselves as conservative, and the remainder say their views are moderate. The ideological lines are only slightly less scrambled among self-identified Republicans. “Everything here hinges on what characteristics or questions we are trying to measure,” Sides told me. “When you ask people if they identify as liberal or as a feminist, you learn whether people believe that label describes them. But you didn’t ask how they define that label.” People might dislike the term liberal but still support, say, abortion access and high government spending. Indeed, 2020 polling data from Nationscape, which assesses people’s positions on individual issues, indicated that young men and women are no more divided than older generations. In every age group, for example, women are more in favor of banning assault rifles and providing universal health care than men are, by a comparable margin.

Or perhaps the unique Gen Z gender divide just hasn’t shown up electorally yet. Most 2024 election polling doesn’t break down different age groups by gender—and even if it did, trying to draw firm conclusions would be foolish. Twenty-somethings are just hard to study. Young people are less engaged in politics, with high rates of independent and unaffiliated voters. Their worldviews are still malleable. Many of them are reluctant to answer questions, especially over the phone. Under those circumstances, even high-quality polls show wildly, even implausibly divergent possibilities for the youth vote. A recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll found that, in a hypothetical 2024 rematch, Trump beat out Biden among registered voters under 35—an almost-unheard-of shift within four years. In October, a New York Times/Siena poll suggested that the youngest generation is equally split between Trump and Biden, whereas last month’s Times survey showed Biden winning young voters by double digits even as he lost ground overall.

Whatever is going on inside all of those young minds, the old people studying them have yet to figure it out. The biggest chasm, as always, may be not between young men and young women, but between young people and everyone else.