Why Young Women Are Becoming More Liberal Than Young Men: The Gender-Equality Paradox
Counterintuitively, gender equality is leading to greater gender gaps
Today marks the return of my regular posting schedule.
In most wealthy nations, women have been steadily closing the gap with men on several fronts. In the United States, women now earn the majority of the bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees. Women now receive more than half of STEM college degrees, and the proportion of women in the tech sector has risen in recent years, to 35 percent in 2023 from 31 percent in 2019. Among Americans younger than 30, women’s earnings rival or even surpass men’s in many metropolitan areas, including Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.
As these gaps have narrowed, we might have expected men and women to become more alike in other ways, including their cultural values and politics. Yet we are seeing the reverse.
This is especially true when it comes to political orientation. Recent polls have highlighted increasing polarization along gender lines on various political issues. Since 2014, women younger than 30 have become steadily more left-leaning each year, while young men have remained relatively static in their political views. In 2021, 44 percent of young women in the United States identified as liberal compared with just 25 percent of young men — the biggest gender gap in 24 years of polling.
In the Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch recently articulated this stark contrast in a piece titled “A new global gender divide is emerging.” He observes that while older women and men are similar in their political views, young women have veered sharply to the left of young men.
Burn-Murdoch cites the influence of the #MeToo movement, suggesting it empowered young women to address longstanding injustices.
The Washington Post’s editorial board suggested that such polarization is to be expected in the United States, “a large, unwieldy democracy.” The Guardian proposes that digital spaces and social media influencers are luring young people into disparate online platforms that cultivate more extreme political views. No doubt these all play some role.
However, I’d like to propose an idea from my home discipline of academic psychology: the gender-equality paradox. This emerged as one of the most mind-blowing findings that researchers published while I was pursuing my recent doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge.
The paradox is straightforward: Societies with higher levels of wealth, political equality, and women in the workforce show larger personal, social, and political differences between men and women. In other words, the wealthier and more egalitarian the country, the larger the gender differences.
The pattern exists not just for political ideology but also for things like academic preferences, physical aggression, self-esteem, frequency of crying, interest in casual sex, and personality traits such as extraversion. In all these categories, the differences have been largest in societies that have gone the furthest in attempting to treat women and men the same.
Of course, there is an overlap for all of these attributes — aggression, for example, is a trait that both women and men can exhibit.
But there’s less overlap — meaning greater differences — in more-equal societies. In China, which scores low on gender parity, the overlap between men and women in personality traits such as extraversion and openness to experience is actually very high, 84 percent. In the Netherlands, which is among the most gender-equal societies, the overlap is just 61 percent.
More recently, a study of 67 countries found that although women generally tend to hold stricter moral views, gender differences in verdicts in hypothetical court scenarios are largest in wealthier and more equal societies. Specifically, women view misconduct more unfavorably than men in most places, but this difference in judgment is larger in richer and more equal countries.
This gender gap has also been found for physical differences in things like height, BMI, obesity, and blood pressure. Across societies, men tend to be taller, heavier, and have higher blood pressure than women. But in rich and relatively equal societies, gender differences are particularly large.
The gender-equality paradox might also help to explain why the gender gap in political orientation has grown among young people. One natural explanation is that young women are outpacing men in higher education, with men now making up just 40 percent of college students. Some evidence suggests that college tends to cultivate more liberal attitudes.
However, even among college students, women are more left-leaning than men. A Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression survey of 254 colleges and universities found that 55 percent of female students identify as liberal, compared with only 40 percent of male students. Interestingly, at schools ranked below 200 by US News and World Report, 45 percent of women and 33 percent of men identify as liberal. At top 25 schools, though, the difference is more pronounced, with 71 percent of women and 54 percent of men identifying as liberal.
Two things to note here:
Students are more liberal at higher ranked schools (vs. lower ranked schools)
The higher up the college rankings you go, the larger the political gender divide gets
The gender-equality paradox can help to explain why the gender gap is largest at the most selective US colleges, where family income tends to be higher and equality tends to be particularly highly regarded. This is consistent with the notion that prosperity and sociopolitical equality magnifies gender differences.
In an interview in The Times of London, the psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams succinctly summarized the paradox: “Treating men and women the same makes them different, and treating them differently makes them the same.”
There are a variety of possible explanations for the gender-equality paradox, but one prevailing view is that as societies become relatively more prosperous and equal, people more fully express their underlying traits and preferences.
Of course, culture matters in explaining gender differences — just not in the way most people think.
In less affluent and less egalitarian societies, gender differences in physical traits are flattened due to scarcity — that is, the shortage of food and other resources stunts growth, especially for men, leading to smaller physical disparities. Moreover, gender differences in psychological traits narrow in response to rigid social expectations.
In the most equal nations of the world, it’s not harsh gender socialization by parents and media, strict societal expectations, or institutional forces that widen the differences between men and women. In the absence of dire poverty and strict social expectations, people are in a position to express their intrinsic attributes and preferences.
The freer people are and the more fairly they are treated, the more differences tend to grow rather than shrink. Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised that Gen Z men and women are diverging along political lines to a greater extent than earlier generations did.
This article was originally published by the Boston Globe under the title “Why are women becoming so much more liberal than men?.”
My theory is that it has to do with women on average being more agreeable (in the Big 5 personality trait sense) than men.
I think the average person, whether male or female) tends to not give a huge amount of thought or obsessive research to abstract things like principles and political ideology; they just sort of go along with whatever the norms in their geographic area and socioeconomic group are. Now, as obsessive nerds like me realize, these norms tend to be a bit incoherent and contradictory, but publicly deviating from whatever your tribe believes can get you a lot of raised eyebrows. Women are more sensitive to possible repercussions from failure to fit in; and most girls learn pretty early on that it’s best to just agree with whatever the dominant female in your group says, whether it’s “On Wednesdays we wear pink” or “Transwomen are actual women!” or “Burn the witch!”
In our current society, the loudest female voices tend to be leftists; which is interesting. Historically, I think the dominant females tended to be the older women and we still have the cultural tropes of the Prim and Proper Spinster, the Stern Librarian, and Busybody Old Lady who used to enforce society’s norms. But these days, our society is much more fragmented and age-segregated; we no longer have grandmas chaperoning dances and kids don’t hang out in libraries any more. Younger generations spend far more time online, but there aren’t many Prim and Proper Old Ladies on TikTok or X so the dominant female voices tend to the more ardent leftists. The more moderate or conservative women tend to not spend as much time; possibly because they have families and jobs and stuff to do - so the loud voices are heavily skewed to journalists and activists who don’t seem to have much else to do. I notice that among my cohort (50ish); the single, never married ladies are the ones who spend the most time posting angry political crap on Facebook, while the rest of us just want to post pictures of our kids and pets and what we ate for lunch.
I think men are also prone to just going along with the dominant view in their milieu; but men are in general somewhat less sensitive to possible rejection by peers for disagreement. I am a woman who has a lot of male friends, and I’ve noticed that men feel pretty free to disagree with each other, and often seem to enjoy a bit of argument. However, that sort of thing can be quite distressing to women; I remember how my female friends who played on a coed ultimate frisbee team were very concerned about some of the male players who were prone to arguing about the rules, and wondered if something should be done before it “destroyed their friendship.” They were also concerned about the other male players who were “caught in the middle” and how the arguments were affecting them. My husband was one of the other male players and he laughed when I told him this - he said the only way the arguments affected him was he sometimes became annoyed that the disputes delayed actually playing the game. It didn’t bother him in the slightest that his friends were arguing; but most women have a visceral reaction to disagreements within their group.
So I think maybe men are inclined to be broadly liberal or conservative depending on who they hang out with; but are more likely to reject particular notions that don’t really jibe with their observations and experiences so they don’t necessarily toe the “official” party line. For example, I live in a very liberal/progressive area; but some of my male friends who would describe themselves as liberal or progressive politically also like guns, don’t think transwomen should be in competing in women’s sports, and enjoy listening to Joe Rogan even if they don’t necessarily agree with all of his guests - all of which would be considered forbidden “right wing” behavior by most liberal/leftist young women.
The self-esteem study finding that more egalitarian cultures have wider gender difference in self-esteem is interesting and I think could be central to the widening political gender differences in Western countries.
I once heard Cokie Roberts and Steve Roberts (married and respected journalists) talk about what makes women and men different. Cokie said that she thought the key difference was that Steve was much more confident in making an argument, on the fly, so to speak, than she. She said she needed to feel more “buttoned up” - more research and analysis. She said this could be because of lower self-esteem and because, as a woman, she anticipated more criticism of her opinions. (I say “and” not “or” because both feed off each other)
Consider that if today’s women feel the same, they are more likely to “go down the rabbit hole” on the Internet to research issues. They are therefore more vulnerable to the algorithms designed to incite reactions (so they keep clicking) instead of making sense of “too much information” (so they stop clicking).
Liberal arguments are more likely to thrive by going down the rabbit hole because they tend to be more theoretical. Conservative arguments are more practical, antithetical to wasting time going down the rabbit hole.