Are Young Men Veering Right? Not really.
On most issues, gender gaps are small and not much different among young and older people
Over the past few months, I've had the pleasure of collaborating with the American Institute for Boys and Men on several data-driven projects. This article presents one of our first explorations, using data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) to measure gender gaps in political ideology, identity, and beliefs.
The political views of young men have become a hot topic.
One reason is their voting patterns: in the 2024 Presidential election young men voted Republican at a surprising rate, as shown in Figure 30 of this report from Catalist.
Another reason is their self-reported party affiliation and ideology: young men identify as Republican and conservative at rates higher than we would expect based on demographic trends. For example, this article in the Financial Times reports a growing gender gap in self-reported ideology on a liberal-conservative scale. And the latest Harvard Youth Poll reports that 29% of young men identified as Republican in 2024, up from 20% only five years earlier.
A third reason is their responses to survey questions on a variety of topics, where young men sometimes violate the assumption that young people hold more liberal views than older people.
Sparked by these reports, we looked for similar patterns in other datasets, including the General Social Survey (GSS) and the American National Election Studies (ANES), and presented the results in this series of blog posts, published in January and February last year.
Our results are not dramatic: on most questions about political beliefs and policies, gender gaps are not large and not growing. And when we aggregate survey responses into a summary of conservative and liberal beliefs, we see only unsurprising trends — women are more liberal than men, on average, and young people are more liberal than old people.
Since then, more reports have appeared showing young men shifting right, young women shifting left, and increasing gender gaps. Some observers have suggested that these gaps contribute to declining marriage and birth rates.
So let's take another look. We'll use data from the 2024 ANES Pre-election survey, mostly conducted in late 2023. It includes questions on political ideology, party affiliation, and a variety of political beliefs. We can use this data to measure gender gaps among young people and compare to gaps among older people. But because this dataset is a snapshot of a single point in time, it doesn't tell us whether those gaps are growing (for that, see this article based on GSS data).
Ideology and affiliation
The ANES pre-election survey asks participants to place themselves on a seven-point scale from “Extremely Liberal” to “Extremely Conservative”. The following figure summarizes the results.
Each bar shows the distribution of responses for one age-gender group. In this analysis, “young” is 18 to 29, which includes people born in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As expected, young women are the least likely to say they are conservative and old men are the most likely. Young men and older women fall somewhere in between.
Counting respondents who identify as conservative (at any of the three levels), the gender gap is about 9 percentage points among young respondents and about 11 among older respondents. These gaps are real, but their impact may be small, especially in terms of relationships between men and women. If we imagine lining up 1000 young women and 1000 young men, and sorting them by ideology, we can see on the left side of the figure that liberal women would be matched with liberal or moderate men; and on the right side conservative men would be matched with conservative or moderate women. It seems unlikely that this degree of mismatch is a major cause of incompatibility.
The pattern is similar in party affiliation:
As expected, young women are the most likely to say they are Democrats, and older men are the most likely to say they are Republicans. Again, young men and older women are in the middle and similar to each other.
Counting people who identify as Republican (to any degree), the gender gap between young men and women is 7 percentage points, the same as in the older group. This is a non-negligible gap, but hardly an insurmountable one. And as we’ll see, the gaps for most other questions are smaller.
Ideology is abstract, issues are concrete
Let's get past labels and talk about issues — specifically, let's look at questions where liberals and conservatives give different answers, and see how young men and women respond. Here's the methodology:
We grouped respondents by ideology and then for each question we identified the responses that were more likely to be selected by self-identified conservatives, which we define as “conservative responses.”
Then we selected questions with large gaps between liberals and conservatives. We omitted questions that are basically proxies for ideology and affiliation, including approval of parties and candidates, voting history, and voting intent. We also skipped questions like “is the economy getting better or worse,” which tend to reflect feelings about the party in power. Other than those, we analyzed 43 questions that pertain to public policy, political attitudes, and beliefs.
For each question and for each of the four age-gender groups, we calculated the fraction of respondents who chose a conservative response. Then we computed the gender gaps.
As an example, consider one of the more mundane questions in the survey, which asks about federal spending on infrastructure.
Among younger respondents, 53% of men think this spending should be increased, and 46% of women — so the gender gap is 7 points. Among older respondents, 67% of men and 61% percent of women agree, so the gender gap is 6 points.
We made the same calculation for the other 42 questions. As a benchmark, we use the gender gap in ideology, which is 9 percentage points. For a large majority of issues (35 out of 43), the gap is smaller than 9 points. This is consistent with a pattern we've seen before: abstract questions about ideology and party affiliation elicit bigger gaps than concrete questions about policies.
Issues with Wide Gender Gaps
This table shows the issues with the widest gender gaps, with links to figures showing the details.
At the top of the list is a question about the way people talk. The following figure shows the text of the question and the distribution of responses.
About 62% of young men say people are too easily offended, compared to 41% of young women. Of all the issues we looked at, that’s the biggest gap we found. And it is noteworthy that, on this issue, young men are not significantly more liberal than older men.
One of the other questions with a wide gap is related to DEI policies at universities.
On this issue, young men are substantially less conservative than older men, and about the same as older women. But young women are much more liberal than the other groups. This example is a reminder that a growing gender gap does not always mean that men are shifting right — it can also mean that women are shifting left.
What about abortion?
When we present evidence that gender gaps are small and not growing, the first question we often get is “What about abortion?” The ANES includes two questions we can use to find out.
Here are the results from the first, which asks respondents to place their views on a seven-point scale from most permissive to most restrictive.
Looking at the total of the more restrictive responses, the gender gap among young respondents is 7 percentage points, and about the same among older respondents. Young men are about as liberal as older women. However, it is notable that young men are the group most likely to choose the most restrictive response.
The pattern is similar for the second question, which enumerates more specific policies.
The gender gap among young respondents is not much bigger than in the previous generation. But again, young men were more likely than other groups to choose the most restrictive policy. For people concerned about the future of abortion access, this is a trend worth watching.
Feminism
In some studies young men are less likely to identify as feminist, compared to previous generations. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they hold more sexist views. The ANES includes two questions that illuminate this topic. The first asks whether women interpret innocent remarks as sexist.
Compared to older men and even older women, young men are less likely to agree with this assertion, and more likely to deny it. And the gender gap among young people is only 4 points.
The second question asks whether women seek to gain power by getting control over men — and the results are more complicated.
Young men are more likely than the other groups to “Agree somewhat” — but young women are more likely than other groups to “Strongly agree.” These results suggest that young people — not just young men — perceive a shift in the balance of power between women and men.
Discussion
On most issues, men are a little more conservative than women, and older people are more conservative than young people. As these trends interact, young women are the most liberal group and older men are the most conservative. None of that is new.
Looking at results from the 2024 ANES Pre-Election survey, we find that gender gaps for some questions are larger than others. That’s why we considered a large collection of questions rather than highlighting the ones that are most attention-getting.
Overall, the gender gaps we found are not so large that they seem especially problematic, they are not generally bigger among young respondents, and in many cases the gender gap is the result of young women shifting left as much as young men shifting right.
Gender gaps tend to be larger on abstractions like ideology and party affiliation, and narrower on concrete policies and cultural issues. Young men are more likely to identify as conservative than we would expect based on long-term patterns, but their views on most issues are on trend.
A speculative explanation for this discrepancy is that “conservative” and “liberal” are relative to a perceived center — and for many people that perception is driven by their peers and media consumption. If young men imagine that the center has moved far to the left, they might be more likely to identify as conservative, even if their views are actually center-left. And if young women believe that the country has veered to the right — as they might if they are concerned about issues like abortion — they are more likely to identify as liberal, even if they have moderate beliefs on other issues.
Related articles:
Jean M. Twenge, "Is Gen Z really more conservative?"
Young Men Research Institute, "They love Bernie and hate cancel culture"
TECHNICAL NOTE. In our exploration of the ANES data, we identified "conservative responses" to each question and computed the percentages of men and women who give those responses. The difference between those percentages is the gender gap.
Another way to measure gender gaps is to identify both conservative and liberal responses, compute the percentage of each, and subtract. For example, this graph in the Financial Times shows the difference in percentages of liberals and conservatives.
This way of analyzing the data can be useful for picking up small shifts, but compared to the method we used, it doubles the magnitude of the changes. To see why, consider a hypothetical starting condition where 30% of both men and women are liberal, 30% are conservative, and the rest are moderate. If we subtract the percentages of liberals and conservatives, the difference is zero for both men and women, so the gender gap is also zero.
If 1% of women switch from conservative to liberal, now 31% are liberal and 29% conservative, so the new difference is 2 percentage points. If, at the same time, 1% of men switch from liberal to conservative, the new difference among men is -2 points — and the gender gap is now 4 points. This example shows that by moving only 1% of the population, we can induce a gender gap of 4 percentage points. So even if we accept that the difference in differences grew by 24 points, that could be explained by changes in only 6% of the population.
Neither of these methods is wrong, but it's important to be aware of the difference.
Thank you for sharing this. It's great to see some data that shows that the state of young men might not be as dramatic as media and public discourse makes us think.