Gender and the politics of Generation Z

But does it really exist? Based on a mere observation of the social climate, one could easily answer “yes.” Young men and women seem animated by totally different interests — women by feminism, abortion, and marches, young men by podcasts, economics, and fringe movements. At that, countless journalists speculating about the Gen Z gender gap have put it on the common reader’s radar. 

The data back it up, too. The phenomenon is international, with young men and women identifying with conservative or liberal ideologies, respectively, at disparate rates in countries such as the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and South Korea. Per that data, young women are more liberal than young men in the U.S. by 30 percentage points. Meanwhile, a solid 53% of young men say they are not feminists, and 45% say they face discrimination.

It is not that arbitrary affiliation is making a small rift out to be a chasm: The Left continues to rule the youth, with 36% of Gen Z identifying as Democrats. That is a significant share of Gen Z who feel confident in party affiliation, leaving 21% who are Republican and the rest independent or unsure. It breaks down further to 41% of Gen Z women and 30% of Gen Z men saying they are Democrats. Rather, a fundamental difference in perspective is what is pushing these two groups apart. The point gaps themselves indicate what is going on ideologically within the age group.  

A little (a lot) to the left

New York Times/Siena College polls for August found a 51-point gap between 18- to 29-year-old men and women, the men favoring Trump by 13 points and the women Harris by 38. Compare that to millennial and Generation X results from the same poll showing about 31- and 25-point gaps, respectively. Young women have jumped significantly leftward, much more than their male counterparts have moved to the right. 

It means something that 40% of young women identify as “very liberal” while every other female age group sits between 25% and 28%. Among men, the greatest share is young men at 25%. One might argue these large numbers of young women identifying as liberal are just that: large numbers, which are not necessarily further left values-wise. But the substance of the Left has seen an undeniable shift in recent decades.

Look no further than the Democratic Party, itself the bastion of left-leaning policy. The standard Democratic politician has to be far to the left of many of the party’s previous positions to gain any credibility. Social issues such as abortion, same-sex unions, and transgenderism are the clearest and most provocative examples. For one, the outspoken desire to decrease the number of abortions and make the procedure “safe, legal, and rare” has been long abandoned, even disavowed. Attitudes as recent as former President Bill Clinton’s toward homosexuality are a plain no-go: The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Act was repealed, and a Democratic president now could not even consider signing the Defense of Marriage Act. And transgender activists, whose policies would have been a non-starter at one point in time, have been able to induce the public into believing that theirs is a question of human rights. 

Young women, specifically, are way ahead of young men when it comes to supporting leftist agenda items. The Wall Street Journal reported a 35-point gap between women and men under 30 years old in favor of “urgent” climate change action, a 43-point gap in favor of forgiving federally funded student loans, and a difference of 35 points between young men who are against allowing children to choose their gender and young women in favor. Likewise, 43-point gaps regarding opposition to building the border wall and to extending Trump tax cuts.

On top of policy specifics, feminism (and topics like it) has become an increasingly apt liberal identifier because of what accompanies it. The name carries implied support for abortion and workplace equity — issues that, unfortunately, can no longer be separated out from “feminist” goals. The great shares of young men rejecting the term and young women concentrating on it indicate pretty well-defined and far-apart concerns, with young women in the camp proven further left from the center.

Responsiveness to the leftward-trajectory of their party makes sense for young women. They are the most likely to be single, on account of their age, and unmarried women are the only group (of the four married or unmarried men and women) who voted majority Democrat. These women carry the Democratic Party, so of course they are more pronounced and more radical. 

And it is not recent that women have become political, as though the Supreme Court forced their hand by overturning Roe v. Wade: Young women ages 18 to 24 have consistently shown greater voter turnout than young men every year since at least 1994. Additionally, young women had a higher turnout in the 2018 midterm elections than in 2022, the election just months after the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. This leftward trend is more than just access to abortion — it is further reaching and historic.

How can this be?

Formative events (like Dobbs, like #MeToo) are the most straightforward explanations for the political gender gap, but the question remains as to why young women have reacted more strongly than young men.

Secularization has been a pervasive force since the 16th century, and it certainly is one now. In addition to a religious decline in America at large, Gen Z men have overtaken their female peers in religiosity. It must be that young women have found some sort of replacement for their religious affections, and indeed, they may have in “wokeness.” 

Professor of politics Eric Kaufmann defines “woke” as the “sacralization of historically disadvantaged race, gender and sexual identity groups.” That is, it makes untouchable any who may have been disadvantaged, independent of how the condition came to be. In short, this is the progressive Left. 

But Kaufmann’s religious analogy is spot on: If young women are the group most inhabiting the Left, and the Left is a cult of wokeness, young women’s decline in religiosity tracks perfectly. They have found a “new religion” in devoting themselves to set “marginalized” people. Just as religion is supposed to do, theirs moves deeper into its cause over time. These young women, lacking any other religious commitment and saturated with activist content that convinces them that they are also marginalized, attach themselves to it in droves.

This effect on the gap plays out practically through a combination of three factors. At the baseline, ballot issues determine what constitutes the “new religion,” what is worth focusing on for the next election. Immigration, gun policy, abortion, and racial justice are all galvanizing issues this go-round, and either side’s positions on given issues come to characterize its constituency. Abortion support, for example, best assembles women of the Left. As it has grown into the ultimate “women’s rights issue” of our time, it has also become hyperfeminized — from pink everything to female body-part graphics. 

Social media platforms determine whom that messaging reaches. Because young men and women frequent different platforms, issue prominence and presentation vary. Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook (sources of short-form, aesthetic-focused content) are prominent among women. Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube are more popular for men. The mode through which divisive issues come to young men, then, is inherently more diligent and less masked.

The real determinant, what filters that content, is their formative political events. For Gen Z, born from 1997 to 2012, these include memories of the 2008 recession, gun control protests, #MeToo and women’s reactions to former President Donald Trump, Dobbs, and, of course, growing up in the digital age. Events related to women’s issues and Trump, just as Gen Z approached voting age, are most pertinent to the gender divide. These events determine how young people react, where they cling, and how radical they become.

Young women saw groups of older women mobilize into the Women’s March and the #MeToo movement take off, both in 2017. Platforms such as Instagram catered to them with galvanizing flashes of information. At the same time, young men looked elsewhere to learn their place in the uproar, whether from forums on Reddit, pseudo-sophisticates on Twitter, or psychologist Jordan Peterson on YouTube. 

No matter one’s bias, each route clearly has a hand in radicalism: Both young men and women are nourished excessively by their screens. Young women are convinced of the ever-present threat of sexism and control, convinced that the threat is imminent and deserves all of their attention. If women’s affairs piqued their interest at all, young men made their way into reactionary circles, which solidified the impression that feminism is a false narrative. They cannot find success because the world is against them, watching their every move and seizing their earnings. This is obviously not the case. What is clear is that young men’s and women’s perceptions of their relationship with one another are entirely opposite. But given how crucial these matters are to their worldviews, they each cannot help but fulcrum their opinions. Right now, Gen Z as a whole is dating less than generations before them, which is likely a symptom of lives centered on political persuasion.

If you can’t negate it, mitigate it

But why the ease in ideologically swaying young women? It cannot owe only to life relevance. 

Thinking back to the religious inclinations young women satisfy with wokeness, Peterson explains in a podcast with Kaufmann some of the factors that go into the uptake of woke beliefs. Predictors for adoption, he found, included “first of all, low verbal intelligence,” then being female, female temperament, and having taken “even one politically correct course [in school].” 

There is room for a woman to feel immediate pushback to Peterson’s supposition, but it lines up with the development we have already discussed: Young women have been raised on digital communication, and their modes of choice certainly do not help verbal skills. Addiction to minute, image- and emotion-based information (which is the premise of Instagram and TikTok) has hurt their ability to reason through content saturation. And activists cannot but exploit the opportunity.        

What is more, universities amplify this trend among young women. Since the ’70s, university enrollment has steadily increased to its current level of about 58% female. A simple echo chamber effect could partly explain college-aged women’s wokeness. Yet women have had female-only spaces for centuries without so drastic an outcome, so that account is far from sufficient.

Peterson explains further: “I think there’s a fundamental feminine ethos that’s instinctive that can be made more sophisticated with genuine education, but that has a proclivity to divide the world up into predators and infants.” It is true, despite cultural efforts to negate sex differences, that women have a maternal instinct. It may be that they live it out in different ways, vocationally, but it exists and it guides their mindsets. Women’s aptitude for compassion, the same compassion that takes a turn into wokeness, finds a meeting place in the female-dominated world of the humanities. 

Alongside Peterson, Kaufmann proposes that women tend to “reflect what is the dominant ethos in a society.” Colleges are the place of primary cultivation: Cultural elites make up the bulk of university donors and “opinion formers,” Kaufmann says, and for them, woke ideology is more advantageous than populist conservatism. The dominant ideology has an open door into the university, where women swim in it, are moved by it, and together reflect their findings to the world by way of devotion to the causes. 

While there also exists an ideological gap between more and less educated adults, there remains a share of uneducated young women who identify as liberal. If their influence does not come directly from the university, it is nonetheless produced by it in part. The dominant ideology is dominant for a reason: It pervades and guides cultural norms. These women may be moved by a similar compassion for the vulnerable, which they see as solved through the narrow scope of the Left. They have soaked in the messaging at their jobs and on social media. Like young men, they feel left behind, unable to sustain a living without a college degree. Unlike young men, they see their savior in woman-focused policies such as abortion and equal pay. They join the fight and follow it as far left as necessary, not realizing (not being told) that these are dead ends. 

Even if one does not buy that women are more emotionally expressive than men, it is easy to conclude that women are more susceptible to exogenous emotional regulation. Their news and their senses of self often come from without, thus the strong relationship between social media use and left-leaning girls’ poor mental health. 

Perhaps the best example of this female “reflectiveness” is the immense rise in LGBT identification. A comprehensive report from Kaufmann deals with the subject in depth. Predictably, identification is greatest among Gen Z. Bisexuality constitutes 15% of the youth, 13 points above any other age group. By contrast, “the gay share is only 2.5 percent and the lesbian share 2 percent” for Gen Z. Overall, “bisexuality is between 50 and 300 percent more prevalent among women than men.”

Bisexual identification is heavily correlated with being a woman, being liberal, and being depressed but not with actual bisexual behavior. As opposed to 13.3% in 2008, by 2021, 54.8% of women under 30 “who identified as lesbian or bisexual reported having only male sex partners in the past year.”

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As expected, much of young women’s identification with the “marginalized” LGBT group is hollow. It is induced by thoughtlessness in the face of persuasion or by a deep desire for ideological openness and receptivity. This latter response is feminine and is not a negative. In fact, it could be used to their benefit if embraced properly. 

Instead, young liberal women are sad and are pushed around by their political benefactors. For a natural, psychological difference between man and woman to be so exacerbated for this one generation, perversions must be at work. Namely, bad politics have suffused public opinion, and young people are tethered to the production line.