A while ago Twitter was obsessed with this graph from data journalist John burn Murdoch at the Financial Times.
This graph illustrates the growing political divide between young men and women in several developed countries.
It triggered a furious row on social media with the right blaming the new gender gap on what they see as excesses of identity politics and modern feminism and the left blaming on what they see as toxic masculinity and a reactive anti-feminist misogyny.
So in this newsletter, I thought I'd take a look at the growing gender gap and offer some tentative explanations for what might be causing it.
But before we move forward, if you want to keep up with all the F1 drama recently (my 🐐 Hamilton is gonna win a WDC), you can't go wrong with Pit Lane Pulse!
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Why Is This Happening?
While there are obviously a whole load of factors, research suggests that the most significant factor in the modern gender gap was actually secularization in the 20th century.
Huh?
Well, conservative parties like Christian Democratic parties in Europe had strong links to the Catholic Church while liberal parties were generally more atheistic.
So, as women were more religious than men and religion is a key determinant of voting behaviour perhaps unsurprisingly women voted more conservative.
While women are generally still more religious than men, the decline of religion and its strength as a determinant in voting behaviour meant that women shifted left in the latter part of the 20th century.
Religion might also partly explain the Gen Z gender gap.
General Social Survey data from America suggests that in the last couple of years young women have suddenly become less religious than young men for the first time in post-war history.
There are also clearly case-specific reasons for this too, South Korea's gender gap for instance seems to be closely related with the fact that South Korea is one of the most culturally conservative countries in the world with a higher than average fraction of men saying that women shouldn't work and one of the worst work environments for women globally.
While in Europe some of the Gen Z gender gap seems to be partly driven by contrasting views on immigration, more generally though commentators often point to the polarizing and radicalizing effects of social media or the increasing salience of cultural issues like feminism and identity politics.
While these explanations might be intuitively plausible to some people, they're hard to actually prove with data so we're not going to go into them in too much depth, however one related and data driven explanation is education women today often spend more years in education than men and education has become an ever more important determinant of voting behaviour especially in the US and UK where one of the best indicators for Liberal voting intention is whether or not you went to University.
Does The Gender Gap Actually Exist?
In contrasting research from the General Social Survey, there is no gender gap that is seen in the results, the difference might be caused by the difference in the methods of the two different studies.
The conclusion that commentators are drawing from this contrasting evidence is that while men and women are increasingly identifying themselves on opposite ends of the political spectrum, when it comes to studying voter preferences on actual policies, they appear to vote similarly.
Conclusion
All in all, the Gen Z gender gap is of course worrying but it is worth interrogating the data before adding it to our ever growing list of societal catastrophes.