Gender divide amongst 18-29 year olds

Parent Cafe
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Interesting article here in the FT, pointing out the stark division in ideology between men and women aged 18-29, and some of the potential consequences, not just for politics but for dating and family relationships. I think those are more interesting than the implications for politics, hence posting it here rather than in the political forum. Have you seen similar differences?

FT gen divide
FT gen divide2800Ă—1776 347 KB

And a Twitter thread by the author, which discusses some of the wider implications for family life: https://x.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1750849189834022932?s=20

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Paywall
And I don’t Twitter anymore
I presume the gap has a lot to do with abortion being front and center for a couple years now, at least in the US. But if you could provide more context, or a gift link, that’d be great.

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I can’t read it either.

My thoughts on this probably belong in the politics forum. :wink:

For now, I’ll just say that while I think abortion rights are an obvious driver for women, there is possibly a subconscious sense of unease among men that is driving their shift towards conservatism.

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I can’t read it without signing up. However, I know quite a few South Korean females, and they are not interested in the traditional female role. Apparently the men still want it.

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Some excerpts:

Today’s under-thirties are undergoing a great gender divergence, with young women in the former camp and young men the latter. Gen Z is two generations, not one. In countries on every continent, an ideological gap has opened up between young men and women…In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes were each spread roughly equally across liberal and conservative world views, 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, almost half of men aged 18-21 backed the hard-right Confederation party, compared to just a sixth of young women of the same age.

The #MeToo movement was the key trigger, giving rise to fiercely feminist values among young women who felt empowered to speak out against long-running injustices

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.

In the US, UK and Germany, young women now take far more liberal positions on immigration and racial justice than young men, while older age groups remain evenly matched.

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And from the Twitter thread:

What’s causing all of this? One theory is negative polarisation. In the wake of the MeToo movement, young women have both become more progressive and more vocal about their views. Many young men feel threatened and have reacted by taking the opposite position.

This could explain how the divide on gender issues bleeds into other spaces.
If some young men think “young women are woke, I am not” (I know it’s an annoying word), then they will instinctively take non-woke (sorry) positions on other topics.

A complementary theory is that these trends are explained by young men and women increasingly inhabiting different spaces.
So much of daily life now plays out online, and young men and women are in different parts of the internet. Algorithmically walled gardens of TikTok.

And this means different — in some cases diametrically opposed — cultures and ideologies can take off quite quickly, and soon you have two halves of a generation who find each other’s views incomprehensible at best, intolerable at worst.

The problem is these theories suggest the divergence will continue, both for today’s young adults and future generations.
Teenagers are growing up in these same ideological bubbles. Hence the popularity of Andrew Tate etc, which is unfathomable to people outside the bubble.

And it’s worth coming back to the original chart:
This trend can not just be palmed off as the sole responsibility of one gender. Young women and young men have both played their part in the divergence.

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 its birth rate has fallen precipitously to become the lowest in the world.

Where do we go from here? It’s hard to say.
One thing that would help is de-segregating online spaces. If top influencers spoke to both sexes instead of just one, that could begin bridging the divide.
Will this happen? Almost certainly not.

I think it’s true that bridging the gap will have to come more from men than women, but I think diagnoses of “toxic masculinity” only exacerbate the problem, causing further negative polarisation.
Young men need better role models, but it’s not their fault they don’t have them.

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There’s another article specifically on the situation in South Korea:

This was really the area I’m interested in discussing: what does it mean if men and women have very different political views - will that hold them back from dating, marriage and ultimately having kids?

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I think so for those who express strong political views. It’s impossible, in my opinion, to have strong supporters of opposite political parties to have deep connections.

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I wonder if this shifts to a middle ground as people have children (presuming they can get along long enough to make that happen) as men become fathers of girls and women become mothers of boys.

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I saw some of the comments on Twitter on the article and I have talked to friends about this trend recently because I believe it could have devastating consequences. Some of my friends laugh at me, but I see a world where 1/2 of all males and females never marry or even have long term-relationships and leads to large population declines, which leads to Social Security falling apart.

My kids (24 year old female and 22 year old male) have never had a girlfriend/boyfriend and quite a few of their friends haven’t either. I already seen the educational divide (My son’s HBCU class is basically 75% female and 25% male), and the consequences of such a large split and I see many parts of our overall society being divided amongst gender, ideological, and educational lines to the detriment of the formation of families.

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I’m not surprised by the findings, though I always hesitate with sweeping generalizations. I don’t intend on diving into the research but will share my opinion. If it comes off as too political feel free to delete.

When I see “conservative young men” and “progressive female contemporaries” I feel those phrases are open for misinterpretation…myself included.

I’m in my late 50s and when I see conservative vs progressive in an article like this, I imagine traditional gender roles. I started to type what I meant by that…man is the breadwinner; man works outside the home/the woman works inside the home…and therein lies the problem with “conservative” views in my opinion.

Traditional roles (and I was a SAHM) relies on conformity. People (yes, probably mostly women) are questioning those societal expectations. You can value family and respect elders, but choose a different path.

I don’t attribute this change/widening gender gap primarily to MeToo. In my opinion the Me Too movement was the continuation of women’s rights…to be heard and valued.

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It’s actually becoming a problem for successful young women of this age who still want to have traditional family to find partner who is equally ambitious and successful professionally. Men in mid and upper twenties are still can’t figure out their footings. Even men in early thirties get burned out at work and just quit and rely on their parents to support them.

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Just because of today’s polarization? I don’t think this used to be the case, perhaps because advertising your political positions to all and sundry wasn’t so common. We have plenty of friends with very different political and religious beliefs and we get along perfectly well because our friendship has nothing to do with politics or religion. My spouse and I just don’t care about discussing politics though we often vote differently. Likewise my parents had extremely different religious beliefs (my mother was a vicar, my father agnostic) but that wasn’t an issue for their relationship.

Perhaps online dating also exacerbates this? If you first meet someone in a bar after a few drinks, the attraction is more likely to be based on looks and conversational skills rather than on political/religious compatibility.

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This ideological divide is fairly recent, starting around 2010. So a lot of the people in this bracket are/will soon be thinking of having children. If it continues, guess what’s going to happen? Men are going to come back to the center because, well, nature. Notice I don’t say women. I think women can mostly manage just fine without men. Women are not going back to the time before Me Too, and trying to control women’s bodies isn’t going to end well.

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While there are political differences, I think this is much bigger than political ideology as can be seen by how widespread this gap is. I’d call it the latest wave of feminism and its reaction. Because of that, it will have lots of ramifications for families and society as these young adults get older.

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This doesn’t make sense to me. Women are more selective in terms of looking for mates with earning potential, height, college degrees, etc. And they also have a biological clock that ticks more loudly. So if they want a mate, they are more likely to have to compromise than men. We see similar consequences in terms of hookup culture being more of an issue in colleges that have many more women than men: the dating rules favor the gender that is in shorter supply.

Maybe some women just give up on marriage and children instead of compromising. But that’s a path to becoming South Korea (and incidentally it will be the unabashed liberals that are left without spouses and children).

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I think, at the risk of getting too political, that the polarization we see today is radically different from the “he’s conservative, she’s more liberal” split we maybe saw in the 1980s or even '90s.

I blame social media. (For a lot.) But also media in general: 24-hour news cycles desperate to create drama, etc.

All of this is funneling people into silos, echo chambers, with click bait links and reinforcing memes.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m in various FB groups for various hobbies. Even in innocuous groups about, like, gardening, it will occasionally flare up into politics (climate change or crop policies) and then I start blocking people who post things I consider beyond the pale.

This is good for my sanity, but I assume everyone does this, and so it’s not that people are talking past each other anymore - they’re not even aware there’s a debate going on. (Nor is there, really, it’s just a lot of yelling.)

So if you’re deliberately surrounding yourself with likeminded people and suddenly realize all your friends are men, or women, and you’ve blocked everyone of the opposite sex because you can’t stand their politics/values/POV, then yeah, it’s become a major gulf.

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Gosh, my D is married, has a child and a career. As she is unabashedly liberal. Go figure.

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But did she find a liberal spouse? That’s great if she did, because those are the ones that are in short supply…

I don’t think my unabashedly liberal D has found any promising candidates who share her political views. Career can be her priority for now, but will that still be the case in a decade? And if she decides to settle, what do you compromise on?

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I think the genders aren’t moderating each other anymore. As kids spend less time socializing in person, the girls, who are naturally more liberal are on social media, and the boys, who are naturally more conservative, are playing video games and on YouTube. They’re each only listening to their own side and it spirals becoming more extreme.

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