Breakpoint: The Growing Political Divide of Men and Women

By John Stonestreet and Shane Morris

Published January 24, 2024

The widening wedge between the way the sexes vote can be attributed to the targeted dissolution of marriage and family.

One feature of American life for some time now is that women, as a group, tend to fall to the left of men politically. For much of the twentieth century, that gap was relatively minor. Until 1980, in fact, the sexes voted within a few percentage points of each other. Since then, things have changed dramatically.

Citing polling data from Gallup, Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies recently pointed out that the percentage of young men ages 18 to 29 who identify as Republican has risen by double digits in the last decade. “Some have doubted the idea that young men (18-29) are turning right,” he tweeted. “Time for them to wake up.”

As late as the mid-2000s, a similar portion of 18- to 29-year-olds of both sexes—just under 30%—identified as “liberal.” However, according to an American Enterprise Institute survey last year, 46% of white Gen Z women called themselves “liberal.”

Some conservative scholars like the Acton Institute’s Anthony Bradley think this emerging divide extends beyond political commitments to other areas as well, including morality. Last week, he tweeted:

Gen Z is different. Women are more liberal than the men and this includes personal morality as well. More and more guys are willing to wait until marriage & fewer women are. Women now celebrate having a “high body count” [a.k.a., many sexual partners] as a[n] empowerment. Today’s young men are more traditional.

More evidence is required before we can conclude that American young men have had some kind of moral awakening, especially given the popularity of morally objectionable figures like fitness influencer and depraved pickup artist Andrew Tate. Still, the trends in self-description seem to hold in other polls, even for high schoolers.

Read more here.