Young Women Everywhere Lean Left, and Young Men Lean Right: What Now?
This growing ideological gender-generation gap is bound to shake up our world
Something strange has been happening lately.
Although for the past few decades, women and men were spread more or less equally across liberal and conservative world views, this doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.
According to figures provided in a recent article in the Financial Times, while Gen Z and Young Millenial women — today’s under-thirties — largely lean left, their male contemporaries lean right.
In the US, Gallup data shows women aged 18 to 30 are now roughly 30 percentage points more liberal than men in the same age bracket. In Germany, that gap is roughly the same, and in the UK it’s slightly smaller — ‘just’ 25 percentage points. And as the article notes, this phenomenon, often referred to as the gender-generation gap or ideological gender gap, isn’t only present in the West but practically all over the world.
In South Korea, the data from recent General Social Surveys of Korea shows a whopping 50–point gap. The gap isn’t as pronounced in countries like China, Tunisia, Poland and likely many others, but it still exists on a scale not observed among older generations.
