A chasm has erupted between Generation Z men and women when it comes to political preferences. But it’s more complicated than you might think.
As polling firms have rolled out additional data, headlines have splashed across papers suggesting men in that age group are becoming more Republican and women are becoming more Democratic.
The theorized gap itself is interesting, but some consider it a concern as fertility rates drop — political polarization has reared its head in dating and marriage. Down the line, other implications of the gap will be subject to academic study and public commentary.
But for now, it’s worth asking — are we misunderstanding the Gen Z gender political gap?
The true gap might be more blue and purple rather than blue and red.
Self-identification
Since 2014, women between the ages of 18 and 29 have become more liberal while men in the same age range have not, AEI fellow Daniel Cox wrote for Business Insider. “It increasingly feels like Gen Z men and women are living on different planets, each guided by the belief that they are navigating uniquely hostile terrain.”
Gallup’s data backs up what Cox said. In a graph starting in 1999, you can see a slight increase in young women identifying as liberal, but it’s a mostly stable trend line. Then, around 2014 it picks up. By 2020 and 2021, 44% of young women identified as liberal. In 2023, that number sits at 40%.
By comparison, men haven’t shifted more than a couple percentage points from 1999 until 2023. In 1999, 24% of men told Gallup they identified as liberal and in 2023, 25% of men said the same.
But self-identification is a tricky way to measure the state of politics by gender.
One person’s conservative is another person’s liberal. Your perception of your own political orientation can depend on the environment around you or what information about each political ideology is at your disposal.
Data analysis from Vanderbilt political science professor John Sides writing for Good Authority has questioned the emerging consensus that Gen Z men and women are starkly different than each other politically.
When you drill down to specific issues, Sides said, “the differences between young men and women are much smaller in terms of average operational than symbolic ideology.” And he noted, the youngest age group didn’t have a larger divide than the older age groups.
Symbolic ideology is how people identify while operational ideology has more to do with specific issues like whether or not to eliminate estate taxes or if the state should provide vouchers for private and religious schools.
So, in other words, Sides says, when you ask younger men and women about issues rather than political self-identification, they tend to be more aligned.
Still, there are key issues where men and women diverge.
The American Survey Center found a gender gap on pornography access, abortion and the #MeToo movement.
Fifty-eight percent of women under 30 said they supported making it harder to access internet pornography while only 42% of men said the same. On abortion, there’s a starker divide with 61% of women saying it’s a critical issue and only 32% of men saying the same. As it pertains to #MeToo, 72% of women said they supported the movement and 52% of men said they did.
Data from Nationscape shows differences between men and women on guns and immigration. Social welfare is another area where men and women voice different opinions. According to the Center for American Women and Politics, men are more likely than women to say that federal spending on social welfare should be decreased.
Voting trends
During the presidential election, the majority of both younger men and women voted for Democrats.
Looking at data from the Cooperative Election Study, women between the ages of 18 and 29 voted for Democrats in the 2020 election at around 69.7% while 67.6% of men in the same age group voted the same way.
During the midterm elections, exit polls show a gap between Gen Z men and Gen Z women in voting. According to NBC’s exit polls for 2022, 61% of voters between the ages of 18 and 24 voted for Democrats while 36% voted Republican. Voters between the ages of 25 and 29 said they voted Democratic at a rate of 65% while 33% of them said they voted Republican.
Young female voters between the ages of 18 and 29 also voted for Democrats at significantly higher rates than Republicans, per Brookings Institute. This was during the 2022 midterms, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and abortion was a high priority issue for many voters.
Democratic group Catalist put out 2022 midterm data that shows young voters supporting Democrats more than Republicans overall. While younger women tended to support Democrats more than younger men, the majority of both voted for Democrats, the report said.
Political journalist and Vox founder Matthew Yglesias cited this data, saying he thinks “the youngest cohort is also the most left-wing.”
“In the contemporary United States, women are (on average) to the left of men, and younger people are (on average) to the left of older people,” Yglesias wrote. “This is all pretty clear in the data and pretty unsurprising.”
It’s this data and Pew’s that Rose Horowitch pointed toward in a recent article for The Atlantic. Horowitch said there was a bigger divide between younger people and older people than a divide among men and women in Gen Z.
This was because, Horowitch wrote, “the unique Gen Z divide just hasn’t shown up electorally yet.”
Whether or not it shows up in the polls depends on which data you’re looking at. It’s true that Gen Z men and women are voting for Democrats at a higher rate overall than older generations, but some exit polls still show a significant divide where more Gen Z women are voting for Democrats than Gen Z men.
For example, The Hill reported on a series of polls that do actually show a gender gap. CNN/Edison Research’s poll shows that during the 2022 midterms, 72% of women under 30 voted for Democrats. By contrast, 54% of men voted for Democrats. The AP VoteCast poll shows a softer divide: 58% of women going blue and 47% of men voting for Democrats.
Looking at both self-identification and voting, it doesn’t appear that men under 30 are a strong cohort of Republican voters.
A plurality of men under 30 over the last two decades have professed their political ideology as moderate, with 44% of them saying they consider themselves moderate in 2023, followed by conservative at 29% and liberal at 25%, per Gallup survey data.
It’s much different for women — a plurality of whom identify as liberal at 40%, followed by moderate at 37% and 21% saying they’re conservative. This means the bulk of young men and women identify as either moderate or liberal.