Girls and Boys are becoming very different

In the first generation that can take gender equality for granted, young women and young men are growing apart – or at least voting very differently. And there are a million explanations...

I first became aware of a political gender gap during the 2018 election period in Brazil. With Bolsonaro set to win, an (ultimately feeble) protest movement emerged, led above all by young women repulsed by the eventual president’s machismo. As I wrote two years later in Jacobin, reflecting on the election and Bolsonaro’s first two years in power:

Another novelty is a growing division along gender lines. Bolsonaro did significantly better with men than with women, the first time gender has become a factor in Brazilian elections. On the other hand, age was not a major factor, unlike in the global North, where right-wing populists dominate among older groups.

Once one combines age and gender, though, a remarkable divergence emerges: men under thirty went overwhelming to Bolsonaro (70-30), while it was only among young women that Haddad managed to edge Bolsonaro (55-45). This was the demographic that birthed the Ele Não (“not him!”) protests preceding the election. So stark is this divide that it would seem to presage a coming conflict in Brazilian society.

I sort of forgot about this insight by the time 2022 rolled around. Lula won, and the most salient demographic divisions were otherwise. Plus, elsewhere, something else seemed to be going on: age and generational divisions seemed more important.

But the gender question is back in a big way. Late last year, El País reported on how the last bulwark against the far right – in Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Poland – was the female vote. Then this January, the FT did a big piece of data journalism on how girls and boys are drifting apart, politically. Here’s some choice stats cobbled from the article, the author’s thread, and social scientist Morten Stostad’s thread on the same.

“In the US, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries. That gap took just six years to open up.”

“Germany also now shows a 30-point gap between increasingly conservative young men and progressive female contemporaries, and in the UK the gap is 25 points. In Poland last year, half of men aged 18-21 backed the hard-right Confederation party, compared to just a sixth of young women of the same age.”

In the UK, all groups of people, young and old, men and women, have become more liberal on race and immigration except young men.

In some places, this trend started earlier. So, in the Nordic countries, young women have been significantly more leftist than young men since the around the 1990s. In Finland, Denmark and Norway the gap is currently at 20-40p.p.

We’ll get to interpretations in a bit, but that there is already suggestive that growing gender equality, or successful feminist politics, is a spur to the youth-gender gap. But the weird thing is that this isn’t just young dudes being reactive and reactionary. Girls are also polarising “leftwards”.

Here’s some other confounding data, taken from Stostad’s thread: In France, Spain and Italy, there were large gender gaps in the 1950s/60s going the opposite way, with men being more left-wing. These days these countries buck this new trend: there are only small youth-gender differences.

Looking across countries, the picture looks like:

• In the 50s-60s, young men were consistently more left-wing (they were young rebels; women were more moderate);

• From 70s on, these gender divergences became minimal or rare.

• Suddenly from this century on, we see this marked progressive young women/conservative young men trend.

Here’s some hypotheses as to why this is happening and some counter-arguments.

• Women have become more liberal/progressive/leftist (possibly as consequence of greater gender equality)

  • But the data shows men polarising more conservative too

• Women have become more liberal/progressive/leftist in tandem with their fight against retrograde sexism and gender inequality

  • But this makes little sense given gender equality has been increasing, and Millennials and Gen Z surely take equality for granted. The patriarchy is dead. Really dead. (I’ll concede that this argument makes some sense in more conservative countries in the periphery and/or those that have seen a genuine conservative wave – I’m thinking Turkey, for instance, or various Muslim-maj countries that have undergone cultural Islamisation – for more on that see my interview on Islamic populism in Indonesia)

• Men have become more conservative, in response to female assertiveness, e.g. MeToo

  • But again, this is a two-way street, so how to explain young women voting increasingly leftwards?

• Men have become more conservative, as a backlash against their emasculation in a deeper sense, tied for instance to deindustrialisation and men’s insertion into “feminised” service sector jobs. This is plausible and speaks to a wider restructuring of gender roles along with material transformations in society.

  • But why are young guys rebelling against this by voting for the right, when they’ve only known the service economy. Surely it’s their dads and grandpas that would be voting for your Trumps. And they are! But so are older women, even if to a lesser degree. The fact that needs explanation here then, is why young women are going left, not young men right.

• OK so how about: women have been principal drivers of the woke wave in general (they have), hence they have radicalised “leftwards”.

  • But this presumes what it is trying to explain.

All the above try to explain the problem “from society” – by looking at social changes that manifest as political signals (voting behaviour). But what if we tried to explain it “from politics” – by looking at how politics, and political categories, have changed…

• Politics has changed become culturalised (yes, undoubtedly). Thus it has oriented around gender or gender-coded questions, esp. affect. So Left = being nice/caring. Whereas Right = being angry/resentful). This new political axis would then play out strongly with regard to the hot-button topics of the days: immigration and race, above all. If you prioritise being nice/welcoming/caring, then you may read ‘open borders’ or ‘open your arms to the racial Other’ as ways of making good on your values commitments. Whereas if you prioritise contestation, anger, resentment, then maybe build-a-wall/protect what’s mine politics resonate more with you.

  • I should be clear: being caring and being angry are both good and valid and necessary. I’m not choosing between these feelings. What I object to is the dumb drawing-a-line between affect and politics/policy. You can just as well read these things in the opposite direction: ‘closed borders’ as protective and caring, and ‘open borders’ as hateful, uncaring, opportunist, and resentful of those who benefit from tight labour markets. Moreover, politicians today don’t do either of these things anyway. There is no closed border or open border option: all mainstream politicians operate a policy of strict hypocrisy with regard to what they say and do, and a policy of strict opportunism with what they do, balancing between capital’s need for cheap labour, and popular resentment having one’s wages undercut.

• Finally, another tempting hypothesis: politics has undergone realignment, such that the Right is rebellious and the Left (or really the liberal centre) is conservative. This would sustain continuity with the 1950s and 1960s – young men remain the rebels, it’s just that before the Left was the way to say ‘fuck you’ whereas now, when there is no Left proper, it is the dissident/alt right that offers the best way to say ‘fuck you’.

  • But so much has changed in gender relations over the past 80 years that it seems difficult to sustain the idea that ‘boys revolt, girls/women stay at home’, or some outmoded things along those lines.

So where does that leave us? Well, a lot of half-explanations. We discussed this in more depth on Bunga with Nina Power, someone who knows a lot more about gender questions than I do (which is rather little, truth be told – I couldn’t even tell you if I think Nina is right or not). She ventures some other intriguing explanations that variously concord/discord with those above. Give it a listen, lemme know what you think.

This is obviously a Big Deal and a Coming Thing, so I’d like to talk to more smart people who think about these things more than I do, so please do suggest any potential Bunga guests.

Thanks for reading my first substack post. Who knows if there’ll be more. I’m sure you’re all on “tender hooks”.