Men and Women Live on Two Totally Separate Political Planets Right Now – By Jill Filipovic (Slate) / March 27, 2024
And one political party is primed to take advantage of that.
It has long been the case that American women are generally more liberal than American men. But among young Americans, this gender gap has widened into an enormous rift: According to recent Gallup polling, there is a 30-point difference between the number of women age 18–30 who self-identify as liberal and the number of men in that demographic who do the same.
That’s largely because young women have gotten much more liberal, while young men have stayed ideologically more consistent—or, according to other analyses, become more conservative and anti-feminist. (Of course, not every person identifies as a man or woman. But gender roles still play a big part in shaping our lives and politics, and in the context of this column, I am focusing mostly on the vast majority of Americans who identify as one or the other.) It’s not happening just here either; the political divide between the sexes is a trend that researchers are observing in some other countries too.
One possible cause of the growing gender gap in the United States: Donald Trump. The former president is a notorious misogynist, and his election in 2016 fueled a massive Women’s March, then the #MeToo movement, a great outpouring of rage coupled with demands for accountability. Women were livid that a man accused of sexual predation many times over was in the White House. They couldn’t take Trump down. But they could certainly start to change the culture of impunity that helped to elevate him.
