One of the most well-established patterns in measuring public opinion is that every generation tends to move as one in terms of its politics and general ideology. Its members share the same formative experiences, reach life’s big milestones at the same time and intermingle in the same spaces. So how should we make sense of reports that Gen Z is hyper-progressive on certain issues, but surprisingly conservative on others? The answer, in the words of Alice Evans, a visiting fellow at Stanford University and one of the leading researchers on the topic, is that 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. Tens of millions of people who occupy the same cities, workplaces, classrooms and even homes no longer see eye-to-eye. 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

  • MechanizedPossum [she/her]
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    edit-2
    5 months ago

    The article claims that this shift is mostly (although not exclusively) driven by young women moving leftwards. The article also claims this was originally sparked by things like the metoo debate and stances on consent and SA and then has spread to other issues like immigration (the article doesn't go into economic policies, working conditions etc and how these may differ between young men and young women). The trend is also a lot more pronounced in occupied Korea and in China than in Western countries.

    Places like Germany also see some rightward radicalization of men, but not to the same degree as women are moving leftwards. Men's attitudes mostly remain the same as among dudes over 30 years of age.

    Edit: Forgot to add what this means for capitalist social reproduction. The article cites occupied Korea as the main example:

    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.