The emergence of a political divide between young men and young women has been one of the most-discussed developments in recent politics. President Donald Trump won 56 percent of men under 30 in November, compared to just 41 percent four years earlier. It’s not just the US, either. Around the globe, young men are more likely to support right-wing parties and politicians than their female counterparts. South Korean men and women, for example, are some of the furthest apart in the world: Voters under 30 had a gender gap of 25 percentage points in support for deposed President Yoon Suk Yeol.
The causes of this divide are complex and have been endlessly discussed. There’s social media and the existence of “manosphere” content creators like Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan, who promote right-wing parties and ideas. Additionally, widespread isolation, especially for the youth, means that social media now has an outsized impact, leading to a distorted public sphere where preferences are distorted by biased algorithms. There is, of course, a gendered backlash aspect: Women have made notable advances in the public sphere over the last five years, and Trump has capitalized on anxieties about such gains, as well as longer-simmering grievances and tensions, to advance his reactionary agenda.
But while much of the debate has centered on electoral strategy, social issues like transgender rights or Me Too, and chastising activists for their unproductive work, the truth is somewhat more nuanced. Younger men are more conservative on some issues, but men’s and women’s differing votes don’t seem to be based on policy differences: Surveys of American voters point to men and women largely agreeing on which issues they find most important, and they mostly seem to trust the same parties on each of those issues.
The best way to understand the growing gender divide isn’t the culture war. It’s how the economy has shifted over the past half-century.
To understand the divergence in values between men and women, one has to understand where fundamental values — such as the support for democracy as opposed to far-right parties — come from. At their core, these develop not from heady cost-benefit analysis of policy, but from prior experiences, particularly during formative years (the “14 to 24” decade).
Let’s start with the most fundamental experience: economic security. Support for democracy relies on democracies providing material benefits. And so, economic inequality and lack of economic growth — which have been accelerating in recent decades — are both associated with widespread turns to the radical, anti-democratic, misogynistic right.
In the United States and Europe, for example, rising wealth inequality and slowing economic growth are linked to support for far-right parties. In Brazil, unemployment increased attendance at conservative evangelical churches that then boosted the support of far-right candidates. The clearest examples come from Nazi Germany: areas more closely harmed by Weimar Era austerity programs saw the largest upswells of support for Adolf Hitler.
A second crucial factor in support for democracy is “social trust” — that is, trust in the government, institutions, and other citizens. Once again, economics plays a role. Economic deprivation and income inequality are linked to lower social trust. Voters in worse economic conditions are consistently more likely to endorse a zero-sum mindset, or the belief that the only way for a person to gain from society is at the expense of others. A zero-sum mentality results in less support for progressive, anti-individualistic, or cosmopolitan values, while non-zero-sum values and high social trust seem to be linked with more liberal values.
Studies consistently find that job insecurity leads to sexist views (for example, among European men), as well as developing beliefs that women’s advancement came at their expense. Chinese men who experience worse economic conditions are also more hostile to women and more sexist, and British men who grew up in high-unemployment regions report feeling less agreement with progressive and feminist statements.
But shouldn’t broad economic conditions — and their associated effect on trust and political values — equally affect men and women, driving both rightward? No.
From the factory line to “Gen Z boss and a mini”
Starting in the 1970s, but especially in the 1990s, most developed and middle-income economies transformed; in particular, manufacturing declined and service jobs increased due to trade, lower unionization, and automation.
In consequence, the labor market split into two: lower-paying “manual” occupations (which include both construction and, say, childcare) and higher-paying “cognitive” jobs. One classic example is ATMs: They eliminated the highly paid, low-education job of “bank teller,” and replaced it with low-paying customer service jobs (the people at the bank counter), and higher-paying “financial services” jobs (the people offering loans, advice, or other bank services). The Great Recession further entrenched this split: The “cognitive” track added 8.4 million jobs (on net) after 2007, while the manual job track lost, on net, 5.5 million.
Since manufacturing was traditionally a “male” job, its decline in the economy meant that men had worse job prospects and fewer opportunities, especially since the skills required in manufacturing itself also changed to require more education. As a result, men without college degrees lost their position as the second-highest earning group of people (after college-educated men). And cuts to social services disproportionately affected men due to their higher likelihood of committing crimes.
At the same time, the decline of manufacturing made men less marriageable (and therefore lowered fertility rates), a dynamic that’s made the situation worse since securing a wife and starting a family was a major motivation for men to work. The other major sector that employs “unskilled” men, construction, suffered devastating setbacks after the Great Recession and didn’t recover afterward. Men are also at a disadvantage in the “care economy” section of the manual sector, somewhat due to (self-imposed) cultural factors: They just don’t want to apply to “pink collar” sectors.
In contrast, the growth in the cognitive sector has benefited women. Men have been falling behind women in high school performance, college enrollment, and college graduation, putting them at a disadvantage in securing high-paying cognitive jobs. The reasons are complex, but they may be related to neurological differences (though this idea has come under criticism). Research suggests that male teachers teach boys more effectively than female ones. This trend was worsened by Covid, which increased achievement gaps in students and, like many other extreme events, reduced medium-term educational attainment.
And after entering the knowledge sector job market, women still retain an advantage. First, women have better “social” skills than men, and these are in greater demand in the cognitive sector. Flexible work arrangements, which have become more common in recent years, have benefited women, who favor flexibility more. And while men do benefit over their female coworkers due to fast-tracked promotions and relationships with (overwhelmingly male) superiors, the reluctance of boomer bosses to retire crowds out younger men from top jobs.
This dynamic has been especially important for men’s beliefs on gender issues (since men become more supportive of traditional gender roles) and have also boosted far-right and anti-cosmopolitan viewpoints for them specifically. One such example is the online vitriol against the “Gen Z boss and a mini” video, where female employees of an Australian company sing and dance about their workplace. It has even been cited by the online, mostly male, right as a reason to support tariffs.
Men’s search for meaning
When manufacturing left center stage, male workers struggled to adapt — resulting in, as social scientists consistently find, lower social trust, zero-sum mindsets, and more regressive gender norms. All of this provided timber for the far-right explosion even before factoring in the manosphere and algorithms.
Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman explains in his book Liquid Modernity that, in the shift from the manufacturing economy to the cognitive economy, men lost their social role as producers and providers, while women shifted away from being caretakers, and both became consumers.
However, Bauman missed that traditional gender norms make taking an identity as “consumers” less attractive to men since men, perhaps influenced by psychological differences in attitudes around money, tend to spend less than women on “frivolous” items such as clothing or entertainment. Feminist messages, such as those seen in books like Lean In and the “girlboss” trope, empowered women to take pride in their role as employees and in business. Likewise, traditional roles as caretakers have not actually been rejected to a large extent, leaving women with many avenues to personal satisfaction while also abandoning men “in crisis.”
The crisis of masculinity is an opportunity to redefine men’s role in an inclusive way of both caretaking and producing. This is especially crucial given how it is unlikely that manufacturing will make a resurgence as a dominant part of the economy.
While this means that direct attempts to raise social trust by putting men in crisis on the factory line seem unfeasible, a surprising silver lining comes from the fact that most young men are not virulent misogynists: sexist views among boys are less common than those same boys think, and this lack of openness keeps them from expressing their real beliefs. One extreme example is that, in Saudi Arabia, husbands are supportive of women working, but refuse to express this belief due to fear of judgment by other men, while their wives want to work, but think these attitudes are not common among women.
So it is possible to break out of the “sexism trap” by encouraging people to express their true views, by encouraging people to make cross-gender friendships and have in-depth conversations, and by building a more prosperous and functional government and economy — since positive experiences with democracy and market-based economies raise support for them and strengthen social trust. If a world of loneliness and economic deprivation can produce these anti-democratic values, a world of social connection and prosperity will surely replace them.
