Gen Z politics: The gender paradox

For high school guidance counselor Jessica Grosland, it’s a familiar tale of two siblings. The same parents, same resources, same neighborhoods. But markedly different outlooks and prospects.
“The sister sits up straight in the chair. She knows she’s got to be organized, and she has a plan for the future. Then the brother kind of slumps in, with his hoodie over his head, kind of disengaged.”
At the high school where she works in Utah, Grosland says, the average female student has a 3.3 GPA, while the average male a 3.0. And girls are nearly three times as likely to finish high school with a perfect 4.0 GPA. Such achievement gaps are typical across the nation, and in fact, across the developed world. No surprise, then, that 58 percent of American college students in 2024 are female, a gap that first surfaced in the 1970s but has widened dramatically in recent decades.
The disparity doesn’t end with academics. The differences now manifest in a growing ideology gap in the newest generation of young adult males and females. Researchers are finding that in the past decade, the life experiences of Gen Z’s women have pushed them further to the left politically than their male counterparts, and those experts wonder if growing differences between young men and women — in politics, ambitions and life prospects — might present a challenge to relationships and marriage.
“Gen Z is two generations, not one,” writes data analyst John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times. “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.”
One typical example is the embrace of feminism as a label. Only 43 percent of young men today consider themselves “feminists,” a recent American Enterprise Institute survey found, against 61 percent of young women. By contrast, the millennial cohort embraces feminism at more balanced levels: 54 percent for women, 52 for men.
Why are young women pushing out and turning left while young men pull inward and tilt right? The answers, some experts suggest, stem from sociological and political shocks that shaped Gen Z’s viewpoints, paired with gendered differences in how these young people perceive social and political threats.
Whenever a new generation flies the nest, researchers race to figure out which way they’re headed. In a democracy, predictions of where the country is headed hinge on the views and choices of each new generation. And with its vanguard now turning 28, Gen Z is ready for its closeup.
Standing by with mountains of data is Melissa Deckman, the CEO of Public Religion Research Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based research and data think tank. Deckman’s Gen Z analysis can be found in her new book, “The Politics of Gen Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy,” which draws on multiple surveys of thousands of Zoomers, as well as extensive focus groups.
Her analysis reveals ideological differences between genders that are much sharper than just a few years ago. For example, data collected in May 2022 show that 50 percent of Gen Z women identify or lean Democratic, with just 21 percent favoring or leaning toward the Republican Party. Her survey found that Gen Z men, however, favored Democrats only slightly, 38 percent compared to 36 percent identifying as or leaning Republican. Comparing this to four years ago during the 2020 campaign, the Harvard Youth Poll found that young women had shifted six points in favor of the Democrats. But young men had pulled the other direction, now favoring the Democrats by only three points, compared to 22 points in 2020.
Gender is only part of the story. Deckman calls Gen Z “the most diverse generation in American history.” Barely 50 percent of the cohort is white, she found, and roughly 25 percent identify as LGBTQ+. And, she found, LGBTQ+ voters are much more progressive on a host of issues, compared to their straight peers.
This generation shares unusually high levels of both distrust and political engagement, Deckman says. “Compared to older generations,” Deckman tells me, “Gen Z is frankly lacking in trust of a variety of organizations in society, from organized religion, to the federal government, to the criminal justice system, and to the media and political parties.”
Their political maturation was shaped by a series of startling events that had a greater impact on young women than they had on men, Deckman says. Most notably, the #MeToo movement sparked worldwide outrage in 2016 and 2017, beginning with Donald Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape and followed by the shocking revelations about Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.
#MeToo swept well beyond American shores, reshaping gender politics from Europe to South Korea. “The impact in South Korea has been pretty startling,” Deckman says. “There has been a tremendous impact on the viewpoints of young women, and a huge divergence there.” In a spin-off from the American #MeToo movement, dating and marriage in South Korea have nearly ground to a standstill, Deckman says, backed by a women’s social movement, known as the 4B movement, which urges women to say no to sex, childbirth, dating and marriage. Deckman cites South Korea and Europe as indicators that the new gender gap in politics is pervasive, deep and unlikely to abate soon.
She says her surveys and focus groups also show that American Gen Z women were pulled leftward by protests organized in response to school shootings that started around 2018 and continued for several years, leading to widespread gun control activism. Before that, Deckman notes, in 2014, Black Lives Matter protests took off after high profile incidents involving police shootings of unarmed Black men. These, too, percolated until 2020, when BLM street protests merged into the chaos surrounding the pandemic. Undergirding all of these events, Deckman adds, were concerns specific to women, including #MeToo, the heightened salience of abortion and the outsized presence of Donald Trump himself.
Trump has become an ongoing bête noire for American women, argues Steven Greene, a political science professor at North Carolina State University who researches gender and politics. “I think Trump, almost more his persona than his policies, made American women feel that their status in society, the gains that they have made, are under threat,” Greene says. “Obviously part of that was abortion, but it goes beyond that. Look at the Women’s March in 2017 and the energy behind that.”
For their part, young men are increasingly skeptical about where the young women around them are heading politically.
Evan Greene, a Democrat, is among those doubters. He is the 18-year-old son of Steven Greene and a student in his first year at North Carolina State University who plans to major in chemical engineering. He expresses measured skepticism about his party’s posture and messaging.
“The Republicans are hammering on economics,” Evan says, “but the far left of the Democratic Party is always focused on gender issues.” These messages, he says, seem calculated to blame rather than to persuade. “You kind of get the idea that people don’t like straight white men.”
But this frustration cuts across racial lines. If a male engineering student at an elite school feels ignored by political elites, it should be no surprise such sentiments intensified among young men of all races who are struggling with their future.
“Young men who are college educated,” Deckman says, “tend to be doing a lot better, but really it’s the working class, disproportionately among young men of color, that haven’t really been able to be as successful, who’ve been more offended in lots of ways, and so this is a real problem.”
Many young men facing those higher hurdles become alienated and detached, well before they finish high school. Across the board, boys are simply less interested in college, says Richard Reeves, a Brookings Institution scholar and author of the 2022 book, “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It.”
“Skepticism about the value of college has grown more among men than women,” Reeves said. And even when young men get to college, Reeves notes, they are less likely to earn a degree, and the result increasingly is that boys and men have neighbors, siblings and spouses with different educational levels.
“You can see it in my neighborhood,” says Steven Greene, the political science professor at North Carolina State, who is Evan Greene’s father. “Across the street was a woman who is a bank manager and her husband installed decks, and two houses up is a female social worker whose husband installs flooring.”
“We need to find a balance in how we talk about gender without alienating men, especially men who are at an impressionable age,” he said. “A lot of what Republicans give is just this performative masculinity. And for somebody less experienced in the world, who is figuring out how to be a man, I can see that there’s an appeal there.”
Steven Greene says he is watching his son’s political maturation with interest, but without meddling. Evan is the third of four children in the family, with the youngest, still in her early teens, being the only girl.
“The sibling dynamics of politics are underexplored,” Greene said. “There have to be so many households where the 18-year-old son is drawn to right-wing masculine role models, and then his 16-year-old sister is a social justice warrior.”
Looking at his neighbors, Steven does note that educational differences don’t necessarily lead to divergent politics. One of his blue-collar neighbors, he says, supported Bernie Sanders, the liberal Vermont senator and one-time Democratic presidential contender.
But right and left extremes in American politics can easily find common ground these days. In this case, there is a shared frustrated desire among men to support a family in the manner that their fathers or grandfathers once did. That’s the perspective of Michael Kimmel, an emeritus sociology and gender studies professor at Stony Brook University in New York and author of “Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era.”
In previous generations, Kimmel says, men working in trades and crafts used to support families with their own income. That’s much harder now. “The U.S. median income of a family of four,” Kimmel tells me, “was exactly the same in 2023 as it was in 1973. But in those ensuing 50 years, of course, the big difference is that mom is working.”
“The core of masculinity,” he says, “is that I’m supposed to put food on the table and protect my family. If I can’t provide for them, then protection may be a more interesting option. Maybe I’ll just buy a few more guns. We can’t provide. So we protect.”
Asked to forecast the future, Deckman expects the ideological gaps between Gen Z men and women will persist, especially given that the phenomenon now seems systemic in the world’s democracies. Young women, she says, now do seem to care more about social justice and equality, while young men worry more about status and economic opportunity.
After years of hovering on the fringes, Reeves says, the challenges facing men are getting attention. Starting this year, he has a new megaphone for his message, as president of the newly-established American Institute for Boys and Men. Seed funding for the project came in the form of a $20 million grant from Melinda Gates. It wasn’t just the infusion of cash that was important: it was also legitimation of the cause from a blue blood donor.
AIBM ties its mission to some concerning statistics, such as the 71 percent of opioid deaths suffered by men, and the fact that men are four times more likely to attempt suicide. For decades, these distinctive male threats have been sidelined.
The group’s initial focus is on research and dialogue, addressing five key areas of concern: mental health, education and skills, employment, the particular needs of Black boys and men, and fatherhood and family.
The group hopes to tackle overlooked male challenges by taking unexpected angles. For instance, their employment arm is tackling underrepresentation of men in female-dominated fields, such as teaching, social work and psychology.
“It’s still relatively early days,” Reeves told me. “I don’t want to overstate it, but I do think that this issue feels much more mainstream. I do think that in some places, like the U.K. and Norway, it is happening a little bit faster than it is in the U.S.”
Reeves was thrilled this spring when the Norwegian Men’s Equality Commission issued what Reeves called “a comprehensive, factual, policy-rich manifesto for boys and men in a society committed to gender equality.”
“Many boys and men do not feel that equality is about them, or exists for them,” the Norwegian report stated, arguing that greater concern for the challenges of men and boys “will strengthen equality policy, not weaken it.”
This story appears in the December 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.