Together, Apart
Smartphones and social media are nudging us into a new kind of gender gap, with teens now joining the fray.
“The way we interpret the world is shaped by our communities and our connections, but now, our smartphones are radically altering that,” says Alice Evans, a senior lecturer in social science at Kings College in London. “People are now socializing far less with each other because entertainment tech is out-competing humans for our attention.”
NEW YORK—A decade ago, in 2015, I invited the photographer Eric Pickersgill to speak to my graduate media students at Columbia University.
His photo series that year, called Removed, had just gone viral. It captured visually, for the first time, how our smartphones and social media were starting to grab our attention far more often and more powerfully than ever before — distracting us from the people closest to us offline, both physically and emotionally.
In this way, Pickersgill’s series remains tapped into the current zeitgeist. One of the most powerful photos in the collection (above) showed a couple who had just gotten married, yet were focusing far more on their smartphones in those moments than on each other.
“We’re at this critical time,” Pickersgill says. “People, when they see the world in photographs, can learn a lot about what connects and divides us, how our behaviors toward each other are changing, and how technology is changing us.”
Fault lines
Gender gaps are nothing new in American politics. The normal pattern is of left-right divides between younger and older generations, with younger people typically more progressive than older ones.
We here at New Rules wrote about the start of the new gender divide last summer, in an post entitled A New Gender Gap Rising , which showed what were then new poll numbers showing how Gen Z women were moving to the left in polls that queried their voting preferences, while Gen Z males had begun to shift right—a first-ever such split among Gen Z voters in last year’s election year polling.
Now that right-left gender split is opening up globally among teens and people in their early 20s, influenced strongly by what social science experts and data researchers say is the rising reach of social media networks leaning right. According to Pew Research, the number of young news influencers who now explicitly lean right are far outpacing those who publicly identify with the left, except on TikTok.
But what’s fueling some of the migration is not just how young people view politics, says Kent University researcher and social science professor Alice Evans. Young people’s attitudes toward women also are changing.
In a recent podcast hosted by Evans, she and John Burn-Murdoch, the Financial Times’ chief data correspondent, cited a range of new survey insights reflecting the gender divide.
Here are some of the highlights:
The teen gender divide is expanding. The split originated in the United States, the UK and Germany last year, Burn-Murdoch says, but in recent months is also now showing up similarly among teens in Spain, Finland and Poland.
Female teens and young single women are moving to the left in much greater numbers than teen males and young men are moving to the right. Burn-Murdoch says young males are now just “a little bit more politically conservative” than young men were 20 years ago, he says—”but not massively.”
Male teens now hold the strongest openly hostile and misogynistic attitudes towards women. “We’re now seeing this really striking thing, that young male teens and those in their early 20s share hostile sexism attitudes in greater numbers than do men in their 30s and 40s, and even men in their 50s and 60s,” says Burn-Murdoch, with these attitudes formed mostly by differing attitudes shared in teen gamer networks online. [Young Gen Z men and women are increasingly at odds when it comes to their support for feminism, according to the Survey Center for American Life.] “It’s not all young men who are into hostile sexism, Burn-Murdoch says—just mostly those less educated and living in families with lower incomes.”
Teen males are becoming more certain about their views on politics and the gender divide at earlier ages. Social media has always magnified the most extreme voices and opinions, but for the first time this past year, male teens have begun to shift their polling answers from “don’t know” to certainty, Burn-Murdoch says. The rise of gender-specific online networks is bolstering the confidence of male teens to state their views more openly, he adds.
There is a gender gap in teen experiences, Pew says. Many of the problems and pressure points teens are dealing with differ significantly for boys and girls, Pew research shows. In addition, many teens see imbalances in how boys and girls are experiencing school and how they’re performing academically, one of the factors Pew says is causing gender friction.
Nearly everyone now has access to (or owns) a new-model smartphone, triggering a flood of new voices sharing new views and new subgroups specific to teen interests and ideas. Says Evans: “Everyone now has more of a voice online, and the freedom to pursue their own preferences without dissent, which is great. But it’s also giving us a society that’s now more bifurcated, splintered and more polarized. It’s not so much that many more people are now advocating autocracy or a gender war. But more voices online are certainly generating more courageous views about what isn’t working.”
The Future
What now? Will a future in which men and women spend less time together increase polarization?
And with fewer young women opting to marry and have children, how will the gender divides affect us culturally and economically in the years ahead?
“Just by understanding different perspectives can help us strengthen our nations’ social glue, to make us more understanding and empathetic,” Evans says. “But we better start building ways besides marriage to help us do that, and soon—because if all of our social glue withers and weakens because we’ve stuck ourselves in isolated echo chambers online, then we’ll get more massive ideological and attitudinal distortions fomenting online, and won’t be able to correct much for future generations.”
Adds Burn-Murdoch: “It may sound obvious, but spending more of our time with humans offline would help us to create more balance and less polarization. We’re seeing some backlash already by teens to being extremely online. But we might have to create new incentives to achieve more diverse interactions across society, and that simple step would help a lot.”
What’s your take on the expanding gender divides we’re starting to see now among young people globally?
NOTE: For more data and insights on this teen trend and our evolving gender divides in general, check out Pew Research’s latest data on teens’ use of social media and the emerging tech-driven gender divide. You might also want to listen to Alice Evans’ in-depth conversation with the FT’s John Burn-Murdoch on her recent podcast episode, Are Men and Women Scrolling Apart?, to learn more about the influence of tech on today’s evolving gender divides.