A major story line of this election season has been the gender gap among Gen Z voters, with young women expressing much more liberal views than young men. Sometimes it can sound like young men are all misogynist incels, addicted to video games and manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate. Young men, it seems, are bitter about their declining fortunes, and they’re taking it out on women.
Recent surveys and a new book by the political scientist Melissa Deckman, “The Politics of Gen Z,” complicate the view of male Zoomers as overwhelmingly conservative or anti-woman. Young men are, in fact, largely supportive of gender equality, though most are reluctant to call themselves feminists. The majority of young men support legal access to abortion, though the issue is not as important to them as it is to young women.
Young men tend to prioritize the economy over social issues, Deckman told me, though economic anxiety runs through all of Gen Z. “Women tend to think about the economy as, is it good or bad for society? What’s happening? And men often, historically, have thought, well, is it good for my pocketbook, my ability to actually provide for my family?” That dynamic hasn’t really changed, even though Gen Z is waiting longer to form those families.
What’s changed is that young women have more of a voice. According to Deckman’s research, Gen Z women are more politically active than their male counterparts — a major historical shift, as men have heretofore been more politically active than women.
The reason that the gender gap in voting seems so pronounced is not because young men have become dramatically more conservative. It’s because of the political galvanization of the young women who came of age during the #MeToo movement, watching Donald Trump remain the leader of the Republican Party despite numerous credible accusations of sexual misconduct against him, and witnessing the fall of Roe v. Wade.
“For Gen Z women, women’s equality has become a defining issue of what they care about and how they perceive politics,” Deckman, who is also the chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute, told me. She quotes a female student from the University of Maryland who told her in a focus group that “Trump winning just kind of scared us all to our cores.” The woman added: “My rights are being threatened and just walking down the street I am being threatened, and I need to do something.”
In terms of the coming election, according to the most recent edition of the Harvard Youth Poll, among likely voters under 30, women overwhelmingly support Kamala Harris over Trump by a nearly 50-point margin. But young men also prefer Harris; 53 percent of likely male voters support the vice president versus just 36 percent for Trump.
Overall, Democrats hold an edge in party affiliation among the youngest voters. Deckman notes in her book that, “despite many media narratives suggesting that Zoomer men are finding the Republican Party more appealing in recent years, particularly as a backlash to the spread of so-called woke politics,” 45 percent of Gen Z men still identify as or lean Democrat while only 33 percent identify or lean Republican.
Young Republicans tend to be more moderate than older Republicans, according to Circle at Tufts University, which researches youth civic engagement. Circle doesn’t break out views by gender, but on reproductive rights, the organization found that Republicans ages 18 to 29 are “much more likely to say abortion should always be allowed: 42 percent vs. 27 percent.”
Deckman also notes that both male and female members of Gen Z are more likely than older generations to identify as independents. “Gen Z is the least partisan generation,” she writes.
One way in which young male voters have been misunderstood involves polling responses to the term “feminist.” The American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life recently published a survey showing that 31 percent of men under 30 identified as feminists, compared with 55 percent of women under 30.
But that doesn’t mean that the majority of Gen Z men don’t support equality between the sexes. The term “feminism” has always been freighted with cultural baggage, and Deckman’s 2022 survey on feminism gave three options: “I’m a feminist,” “I’m not a feminist, but I support women’s equality” and “I don’t identify as a feminist in any way.” Sixteen percent of Gen Z men said they were feminists, 54 percent said they support women’s equality even though they don’t use the term, and 30 percent of Gen Z men said they don’t identify as feminist in any way.
Clearly Gen Z is not a monolith. While they are the minority, there are still some Zoomer women who identify as conservative, and while I think the anti-feminist #MeToo backlash among young men has been overstated, there are men in this generation who feel aggrieved by the progress women have made, and some are lashing out in appalling ways.
Looking at the way young women and men understand their votes certainly doesn’t suggest we’re going to be walking hand in hand toward a sunshine-y pro-female world even if we get our first female president. But I have always been skeptical of the toxic young man caricature and have long felt that it may be as corrosive to understanding one another as the caricature of feminists as man-hating harpies.
Liberal young women mostly don’t hate men; they’re just appalled by the erosion of their rights and want to do something about it. There is a lot of space for productive conversation, and anyone who cares about the future status of women and girls should parse the political dynamics of Gen Z more accurately, rather than relying on stereotypes.
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The post The Misogyny of Gen Z Men Has Been Overstated appeared first on New York Times.
