A New Gender Gap, Rising

Young men and women are shifting apart politically. What's driving it?

There is a new “attitude gap” surfacing this election season over how society should be viewing Americans’ gender roles and rights. GenZ’s newest voters are elevating the split.

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NEW YORK — For a long while now, American women, especially young women, have trended more politically progressive than American men. But this election year, for many GenZers and young Millennials —many of whom will be voting for the first time this November—there is a new “attitude gap” between men and women over gender roles and rights in America.

New election-year surveys indicate that since a reinvigoration of the women’s movement just after Donald Trump’s 2016 election to the White House, the gap in Americans’ political attitudes toward gender is again shifting. In the March 2024 Views of the Electorate research survey, 39% of men identified as Republican versus 33% of women—a six-point gap. But when the survey asked participants how society treats (or should treat) men and women, the attitude gap over gender roles and rights exploded. Some 61% of Democrats said women face “a lot” or “a great deal of discrimination” while only 19% of Republicans agreed.

This growing attitude divide, researchers say, is showing up most aggressively among GenZers. According to the Survey Center on American Life, there is now a nearly 20-point gender gap between young men and women who self-identify as feminists—defined by the Center as “people who believe that women and men should have equal rights.” Some 43% of GenZ men said they should, compared with 61% of GenZ women, while nearly one in four GenZ men say they, too, have experienced discrimination or were the subject of mistreatment simply because they were men—a rate far greater than older men. And party-wise, says Gallup, there is now a 30-point difference between the number of women aged 18-29 who self-identify as Democrats and the number of men in that same demographic who do not.

Paula Franzese, a visiting adjunct professor at Barnard College, said in an interview that the two parties “are more polarized today by their attitudes about gender” than ever before in recent history.

Here’s why it matters, now and next:

• Gender equality, as a value, is held by less than half of GenZ men. While young women have been moving in large numbers to the left politically, young males—very few of whom were old enough to vote in 2020— have been racing to the right. From 2017 to 2024, the share of men under 30 who said the U.S. has gone “too far” promoting gender equality more than doubled, according to the American Enterprise Institute. Gallup’s data also shows that young men are now leaning toward the Republican Party more than at any other point this century.

• The shift in voter attitudes about gender is further shaping this year’s presidential election. The sudden withdrawal of President Joe Biden from his race for re-election has catalyzed many young women to become more active and vocal in this year’s election, as Vice President Kamala Harris begins her run for the White House and as both Democrats and Republicans begin elevating their focus on gender policy and culture divisions. Much of the Democratic Party’s platform includes repealing the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade and protecting and advancing women’s fundamental rights. Trump, on the other hand—and the Republican party—are making the subject of “manhood” increasingly central to how they campaign. Political commentator Molly Jong-Fast wrote recently in Vanity Fair that Trump’s GOP platform, if turned into law, would “bring women’s rights back to a pre-1960’s state.” Gender issues now seem like one of the clearest splits between the parties.

• GenZ is poised to expand its political influence in November—both online and at the ballot box. As many as 7 million to 9 million more racially and culturally diverse GenZers will be old enough to cast ballots this fall. And for the first time, GenZ and Millennials, combined, could account for as many votes this November as those cast by today’s Baby Boomers and their active elders—the groups that have made up the majority of voters for decades. Because more GenZ men are moving right politically, Donald Trump is courting them actively. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, is making many of her early campaign appearances to appeal directly to women. In some early polls, Harris is now within a percentage point of GOP nominee Donald Trump, with GenZ women now helping Democrats to raise more grassroots money, excite new voting blocs and win the kind of celebrity influencer endorsements on TikTok and other digital platforms previously out of reach for Biden.

What Shifted?

Gender gaps are nothing new in American politics. The normal pattern is of left-right divides between younger and older generations, with younger voters typically more liberal than older ones. What’s new is the hard-to-ignore political chasm that has opened up between men and women within GenZ.

Part of the reason, says Daniel Cox, a scholar at the center-right American Enterprise Institute, is that young men “have not had the same type of formative experiences as young women.” The Supreme Court’s decision to end the constitutional right to abortion, Cox wrote in a June 2023 essay, Are Young Men Becoming Conservative? “was a political accelerant for young women. The #MeToo movement and Donald Trump’s election were also seminal political events in the lives of many young women. These experiences continue to shape the outlook of young women who increasingly perceive society as hostile to women and believe that the experiences of other women in the U.S. and abroad are connected to what happens in their own lives.”

Data from Gallup shows that in the United States, the young voters’ gender gap in ideology is five times wider than in 2000, and wider than at any previous point in polling history. There are similar gaps in Germany and the U.K. and much starker divides in South Korea and China.

“At no time in the past quarter century has there been such a rapid divergence between the views of young men and women,” says Cox, who is documenting these shifts.

What Now?

Elaine Kamarck and Jordan Muchnick, both gender and political researchers at the Brookings Institution, say the emergence of this new gender gap “may be signaling that we’re in the opening stages of a social backlash” to the progressive social movements of the past decades.

“…Young men have repeatedly been found in recent years to be apathetic toward voting,” they said, and added: “When significant societal change occurs, as it is now, some may feel left behind or cheated. Right now, young men fall into that camp.”

Richard Reeves, the author of the 2022 book, Of Boys and Men, has said in recent interviews that the left has become “more adept at shaming toxic masculinity” than showcasing a positive masculinity “distinct from femininity.” In all six key swing states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—the working-class male share of the electorate is higher than the national average. Reeves says regardless of whether young male voters end up helping Trump win in November, Democrats will need to work hard to win them back.

War of Words

This past week, the gender gap was the focus of both parties, with celebrities, Taylor Swift fans and politicians slamming Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance for comments he made in a 2021 video interview about women who don’t have children. In that video, which the Kamala Harris campaign shared widely this past week, Vance called Democrats, including Harris, “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made, and who want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

Not to be outdone, supporters of Kamala Harris engaged last week in calling Trump and Vance and their policies “weird,” and the messaging quickly went viral. Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minnesota), for a while under consideration as a possible vice presidential pick, said in several interviews: “These guys (Trump and Vance) are just weird. …They’re running for He-Man women-haters’ club or something. That’s not what people are interested in.”

To be sure, the two parties’ dueling and divided cultural attitudes toward gender roles and the gender-driven experiences of their constituents is not just a strong signal of cultural and political change this election year, it’s also unprecedented as a core difference and focus of the two parties in a presidential race, says Karmarck, “and is, therefore, also a little weird.”

Let’s see how it plays out in November.

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What do you think of this election year’s political gender gap? Want to learn more about how the gender gap is tracking globally? Check out the 2024 Global Gender Gap report released by the World Economic Forum, and let us know what you think.