Latest news with #genderdivide
Khaleej Times
3 days ago
- Business
- Khaleej Times
Why Gen-Z is voting differently and what it means for global politics
South Korea's young women are expected to lead a broad political backlash against the main conservative party during the presidential elections on June 3, punishing it for months of chaos. Multitudes of young men, though, are unlikely to join them. In democracies worldwide, a political gender divide is intensifying among Gen Z voters, with young men voting for right-wing parties and young women leaning left, a break from pre-pandemic years when both tended to vote for progressives. Recent elections spanning North America, Europe, and Asia show this trend is either consolidating or accelerating, with angry, frustrated men in their 20s breaking to the right. First-time South Korean voter Lee Jeong-min is one of them. He says he will vote for the right-wing Reform Party's candidate, Lee Jun-seok, on June 3. The candidate vows to shut down the ministry of gender equality, speaking to an issue that resonates with men like Lee, who particularly resents that only men have to do military service. 'As a young man, I find this to be one of the most unfair realities of living in Korea. At the prime of their youth — at 21 or 22 years old — young men, unlike their female peers, are unable to fully engage in various activities in society because they have to serve 18 months in the military.' In South Korea, almost 30 per cent of men aged 18-29 plan to back the Reform Party compared with just 3 per cent of young women, according to a Gallup Korea poll this month. Overall, more than half of the men back right-wing parties while almost half the women want the left-wing Democratic Party candidate to win. The divergence shrinks for older age groups. Political economist Soohyun Lee, of King's College London, said many young South Korean men felt unable to meet society's expectations: find a good job, get married, buy a home, and start a family. And they blame feminism, many believing that women are preferred for jobs. With negligible immigration in South Korea, Lee said, 'women become the convenient scapegoat'. ANGRY YOUNG MEN In South Korea and other democracies, Gen Z men are seeing an erosion of their relative advantage, especially since the pandemic — to the point where in a few countries the gender pay gap among 20-somethings favours young women. European Union (EU) data shows one of them is France, where men aged 18-34 voted in larger numbers for Marine le Pen's far-right party than women in last year's legislative elections. In the UK, where more young men than women vote conservative, males aged 16-24 are more likely to be neither employed nor in education than their female counterparts, official data shows. In the West, young men blame immigration as well as diversity programmes for job competition. In Germany's general election in February, the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) won a record 20.8 per cent of the vote, tugged along by an undercurrent of support from young men — though the leader of the party is a woman. Men aged 18-24 voted 27 per cent for the AfD while young women ran to the other end of the political spectrum, voting 35 per cent for the far-left Linke party, according to official voting data. 'A lot of young men are falling for right-wing propaganda because they're upset, they have the feeling they're losing power,' said 18-year-old Molly Lynch, a Berliner who voted for Linke, drawn by its stand on climate change and economic inequality. 'But, it's actually losing power over women that wasn't actually equal in the first place.' The gender divide is not restricted to Gen Z, voters born since the mid-to-late 1990s. Millennials, who are in their 30s and early 40s, have felt the winds of change for longer. In Canada last month, men aged 35-54 voted 50 per cent for opposition conservatives in an election turned upside down by US President Donald Trump's tariffs on his northern neighbour. The Liberals, who had been braced for defeat, rode an anti-Trump wave back to power, thanks in large part to women voters. 'It tends to be men who have a bit more life experience and are now in that situation where they're saying, 'This isn't working out for me and I want change',' said Darrell Bricker, global chief executive of public affairs at polling firm Ipsos. Nik Nanos, founder of Canadian polling outfit Nanos Research, agreed, saying social media was accelerating democracy's 'angry young men symptom', especially in areas where blue collar jobs have dried up. A FOREVER WAR? Trump's 2024 presidential campaign, which promised a manufacturing renaissance and attacked diversity programmes, also resonated with young white and Hispanic men, but turned off young women, fuelling the country's big political gender gap. Roughly half of men aged 18-29 voted for Trump, while 61 per cent of young women went for his opponent, Kamala Harris. Young Black voters of both genders still overwhelmingly backed Harris. In Australia, which went to the polls this month, the Gen Z war did not play out at the ballot box. There was no clear divergence, with compulsory voting perhaps helping to explain why radicalised gender politics have not taken root. 'It tends to iron out extreme ideas, ideologies,' said political scientist Intifar Chowdury of Australian National University. So how does the Gen Z war end? Pollsters said it could drag on unless governments addressed core issues such as home affordability and precarious employment. One cited young men's health as another policy challenge, especially high suicide rates. Lee, of King's College, said the divide could make consensus on over-arching tax and welfare reforms harder to achieve. 'If the future generation is ever so divided along the lines of gender and then refuses to engage with each other to build social consensus, I do not think we can successfully tackle these huge issues,' she said. — Reuters
Japan Times
4 days ago
- Business
- Japan Times
How a Gen Z gender divide is reshaping democracy
South Korea's young women are expected to lead a broad political backlash against the main conservative party during the presidential election on June 3, punishing it for months of chaos. Multitudes of young men, though, are unlikely to join them. In democracies worldwide, a political gender divide is intensifying among Generation Z voters, with young men voting for right-leaning parties and young women leaning left, a break from prepandemic years when both tended to vote for progressives. Recent elections spanning North America, Europe and Asia show this trend is either consolidating or accelerating, with angry, frustrated men in their 20s breaking to the right. First-time South Korean voter Lee Jeong-min is one of them. He says he will vote for the right-leaning Reform Party's candidate, Lee Jun-seok, on June 3. Lee, the candidate, vows to shut down the ministry of gender equality, speaking to an issue that resonates with men like Lee, the voter, who particularly resents that only men have to do military service. "As a young man, I find this to be one of the most unfair realities of living in Korea. At the prime of their youth — at 21 or 22 years old — young men, unlike their female peers, are unable to fully engage in various activities in society because they have to serve 18 months in the military." In South Korea, almost 30% of men age 18 to 29 plan to back the Reform Party compared with just 3% of young women, according to a Gallup Korea poll this month. Overall, more than half of the men back right-leaning parties while almost half the women want the left-leaning Democratic Party candidate to win. The divergence shrinks for older age groups. Political economist Soohyun Lee, of King's College London, said many young South Korean men felt unable to meet society's expectations: find a good job, get married, buy a home and start a family. And they blame feminism, many believing that women are preferred for jobs. With negligible immigration in South Korea, Lee said, "women become the convenient scapegoat." Angry young men In South Korea and other democracies, Gen Z men are seeing an erosion of their relative advantage, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic — to the point where in a few countries, the gender pay gap among 20-somethings favors young women. EU data shows one of them is France, where men age 18 to 34 voted in larger numbers for Marine le Pen's far-right party than women in last year's legislative elections. A carnival float depicting an exchange between Gen Z and baby boomers, is presented ahead of the traditional Rose Monday Carnival parade in Cologne, Germany, on Feb. 25. | REUTERS In the U.K., where more young men than women vote conservative, males age 16 to 24 are more likely to be neither employed, nor in education than female counterparts, official data shows. In the West, young men blame immigration as well as diversity programs for competition for jobs. In Germany's general election in February, the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) won a record 20.8% of the vote, tugged along by an undercurrent of support from young men — though the leader of the party is a woman. Men age 18 to 24 voted 27% for the AfD while young women ran to the other end of the political spectrum, voting 35% for the far-left Linke party, according to official voting data. "A lot of young men are falling for rightwing propaganda because they're upset, they have the feeling they're losing power," said Molly Lynch, 18, a Berliner who voted for Linke, drawn by its stand on climate change and economic inequality. "But it's actually losing power over women that wasn't actually equal in the first place." The gender divide is not restricted to Gen Z, or voters born since the mid-to-late 1990s. Millennials, who are in their 30s and early 40s, have felt the winds of change for longer. In Canada last month, men age 35 to 54 voted 50% for opposition conservatives in an election turned upside down by U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs on his northern neighbor. The Liberals, which had been braced for defeat, rode an anti-Trump wave back to power, thanks in large part to female voters. "It tends to be men who have a bit more life experience and are now in that situation where they're saying, 'This isn't working out for me, and I want change,'" said Darrell Bricker, global chief executive of public affairs at polling firm Ipsos. Nik Nanos, founder of Canadian polling outfit Nanos Research, agreed, saying social media was accelerating democracy's "angry young men symptom," especially in areas where blue collar jobs have dried up. A forever war? Trump's 2024 presidential campaign, which promised a manufacturing renaissance and attacked diversity programs, also resonated with young white and Hispanic men, but turned off young women, fueling the country's big political gender gap. Roughly half of men age 18 to 29 voted for Trump, while 61% of young women went for his opponent, Kamala Harris. Young Black voters of both genders still overwhelmingly backed Harris. In Australia, which went to the polls this month, the Gen Z war did not play out at the ballot box. There was no clear divergence, with compulsory voting perhaps helping to explain why radicalized gender politics have not taken root. "It tends to iron out extreme ideas, ideologies," said political scientist Intifar Chowdury of Australian National University. So how does the Gen Z war end? Pollsters said it could drag on unless governments addressed core issues such as home affordability and precarious employment. One cited young men's health as another policy challenge, especially high suicide rates. Lee, of King's College, said the divide could make consensus on over-arching tax and welfare reforms harder to achieve. "If the future generation is ever so divided along the lines of gender and then refuses to engage with each other to build social consensus, I do not think we can successfully tackle these huge issues," she said.
Reuters
4 days ago
- Business
- Reuters
How a Gen Z gender divide is reshaping democracy
SEOUL/LONDON/BERLIN, May 29 (Reuters) - South Korea's young women are expected to lead a broad political backlash against the main conservative party at presidential elections on June 3, punishing it for months of chaos. Multitudes of young men, though, are unlikely to join them. In democracies worldwide, a political gender divide is intensifying among Gen Z voters, with young men voting for right-wing parties and young women leaning left, a break from pre-pandemic years when both tended to vote for progressives. Recent elections spanning North America, Europe and Asia show this trend is either consolidating or accelerating, with angry, frustrated men in their 20s breaking to the right. First-time South Korean voter Lee Jeong-min is one of them. He says he will vote for the right-wing Reform Party's candidate, Lee Jun-seok, on June 3. Lee, the candidate, vows to shut down the ministry of gender equality, speaking to an issue that resonates with men like Lee, the voter, who particularly resents that only men have to do military service. "As a young man, I find this to be one of the most unfair realities of living in Korea. At the prime of their youth — at 21 or 22 years old — young men, unlike their female peers, are unable to fully engage in various activities in society because they have to serve 18 months in the military." In South Korea, almost 30% of men aged 18-29 plan to back the Reform Party compared with just 3% of young women, according to a Gallup Korea poll this month. Overall, more than half of the men back right-wing parties while almost half the women want the left-wing Democratic Party candidate to win. The divergence shrinks for older age groups. Political economist Soohyun Lee, of King's College London, said many young South Korean men felt unable to meet society's expectations: find a good job, get married, buy a home and start a family. And they blame feminism, many believing that women are preferred for jobs. With negligible immigration in South Korea, Lee said, "women become the convenient scapegoat". In South Korea and other democracies, Gen Z men are seeing an erosion of their relative advantage, especially since the pandemic -- to the point where in a few countries the gender pay gap among 20-somethings favours young women. EU data shows one of them is France, where men aged 18-34 voted in larger numbers for Marine le Pen's far-right party than women in last year's legislative elections. In the UK, where more young men than women vote conservative, males aged 16-24 are more likely to be neither employed, nor in education than female counterparts, official data shows. In the West, young men blame immigration as well as diversity programmes for competition for jobs. In Germany's general election in February, the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) won a record 20.8% of the vote, tugged along by an undercurrent of support from young men -- though the leader of the party is a woman. Men aged 18-24 voted 27% for the AfD while young women ran to the other end of the political spectrum, voting 35% for the far-left Linke party, according to official voting data. "A lot of young men are falling for right-wing propaganda because they're upset, they have the feeling they're losing power," said Molly Lynch, 18, a Berliner who voted for Linke, drawn by its stand on climate change and economic inequality. "But it's actually losing power over women that wasn't actually equal in the first place." The gender divide is not restricted to Gen Z, voters born since the mid-to-late 1990s. Millennials, aged in their 30s and early 40s, have felt the winds of change for longer. In Canada last month, men aged 35-54 voted 50% for opposition conservatives in an election turned upside down by U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs on his northern neighbour. The Liberals, which had been braced for defeat, rode an anti-Trump wave back to power, thanks in large part to female voters. "It tends to be men who have a bit more life experience and are now in that situation where they're saying, 'This isn't working out for me and I want change'," said Darrell Bricker, global chief executive of public affairs at polling firm Ipsos. Nik Nanos, founder of Canadian polling outfit Nanos Research, agreed, saying social media was accelerating democracy's "angry young men symptom", especially in areas where blue collar jobs have dried up. Trump's 2024 presidential campaign, which promised a manufacturing renaissance and attacked diversity programmes, also resonated with young white and Hispanic men, but turned off young women, fuelling the country's big political gender gap. Roughly half of men aged 18-29 voted for Trump, while 61% of young women went for his opponent, Kamala Harris. Young Black voters of both genders still overwhelmingly backed Harris. In Australia, which went to the polls this month, the Gen Z war did not play out at the ballot box. There was no clear divergence, with compulsory voting perhaps helping to explain why radicalised gender politics have not taken root. "It tends to iron out extreme ideas, ideologies," said political scientist Intifar Chowdury of Australian National University. So how does the Gen Z war end? Pollsters said it could drag on unless governments addressed core issues such as home affordability and precarious employment. One cited young men's health as another policy challenge, especially high suicide rates. Lee, of King's College, said the divide could make consensus on over-arching tax and welfare reforms harder to achieve. "If the future generation is ever so divided along the lines of gender and then refuses to engage with each other to build social consensus, I do not think we can successfully tackle these huge issues," she said.
Telegraph
26-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
How the war of the sexes is changing politics forever
In his 1845 novel Sybil, Benjamin Disraeli coined the term 'two nations' to refer to the divide between the rich and the poor. But in British politics today, increasingly the two nations are men and women. The easiest way to predict how someone voted at this month's local elections was their sex. On the Left, nearly 60 per cent of Green voters were female. On the Right, three out of five Reform voters were male. Nor is this purely a British phenomenon. Political divergence between men and women is a worldwide trend, detectable in the United States, Germany, South Korea and beyond. In Britain, as elsewhere, the gender divide is particularly extreme among the young, notably Gen Z born between 1997-2010. In the 2024 general election, men under 25 were more than twice as likely to vote Reform as young women. Young women, in turn, were almost twice as likely to vote Green as young men. The new divide is all the more remarkable in that it inverts a norm that has existed since universal suffrage. After they gained the vote in 1918, women – who tended to be more religious and socially conservative – were a reliable bulwark of Tory support. Had only women voted, the Conservatives would have won every general election from 1950 to 1992. Not until 2017 were women more likely than men to vote for Labour. Now, global political gender dynamics have been transformed. Women have not merely moved to the Left of men; in many countries, the voting gap between the sexes is now larger than ever before. 'Generations tend to move together – not go in different directions, across gender lines,' says Prof Bobby Duffy from King's College London. 'This is a new development. There's a very unusual trend of a split within a cohort, Gen Z.' A feminism backlash? Traditionally, age and class were the two main cleavages in British politics, explains Luke Tryl, the UK director of the polling company More in Common. Now, these have been replaced by two new interrelated divides: gender and education. Today, 57 per cent of UK higher education students are female. There are now four female graduates for every three male graduates. Differing levels of education are driving the sexes apart at the ballot box. Young people almost invariably lean well to the Left of older generations. But Reform is now the most popular party among non-graduate young men: 26.1 per cent of men under 25 without a degree support the party. Just 10.7 per cent of young men with a degree support Reform. Yet only about half the gender divide is explained by women attending university in greater numbers, Tryl estimates. The other half is rooted in different cultural and social attitudes. Even when young men are as well-educated as women, and earn as much, they still tend to be more Right wing. The contrast can be explained by differing priorities. Men tend to be anti-immigration, perhaps because working-class men feel particularly under threat from low-skilled migration. Men are also generally less motivated by climate concerns. The #MeToo movement, and feminism more broadly, are sharply polarising issues too. Indeed, by some metrics young men are more anti-feminist than older cohorts. Worldwide, the pollsters Ipsos found, 57 per cent of Gen Z men agree that 'we have gone so far in promoting women's equality that we are discriminating against men', compared with 44 per cent of male baby boomers. 'There's possibly a backlash among younger men,' says Rosie Campbell, a professor of politics at King's College London and an expert in voting behaviour. 'This attitude to gender equality is something new.' For all the focus on young men shifting Right, women have shifted Left by at least as much. 'Young women have moved to the Left over a very long period – it's happening more in every generation,' Campbell explains. The rise in female education and employment, and declining religiosity, has driven women to the Left. Being unmarried is also more correlated with having Left-wing views for women than for men. Two worlds Increasingly gendered media consumption threatens to exacerbate these divides. For most of democratic history, men and women have largely used the same mainstream news sources. No longer. The Joe Rogan Experience, a podcast by an American comedian and mixed martial arts commentator, rallied young men to Donald Trump in the US election. His listeners supported Trump over Kamala Harris by a margin of two to one. The Joe Rogan Experience is also top of the podcast charts in the UK; around 80 per cent of listeners are male, with the majority under 35. Even the types of media that people consume are gendered. YouTube and podcasts are more popular among men; social media, including Instagram, has particularly strong appeal to women. 'If you're a young woman, the algorithm thinks that you're going to [vote] Green. If it sends you anything about politics, it might be on that side,' Campbell observes. 'And vice versa for young men.' The struggling economy multiplies such differences. The poor jobs market encourages men and women alike to see progress as a zero-sum game, in which opportunities for one gender come at the expense of the other. 'When you have more economic pressure on cohorts, it does sharpen the sense of division within them,' Duffy reflects. A global split This divide is being seen around the world. In the US last November, Kamala Harris won women voters by 8 per cent. This advantage was more than cancelled out by Trump winning male voters by 14 per cent. The same trend was detectable in three other countries this year. In Germany, in February, the Right-wing populists AfD won 27 per cent of men aged under 25 but only 15 per cent of young women, Ansgar Hudde of the University of Cologne has found. Die Linke ('The Left') won 35 per cent of females under 25, but just 16 per cent of males. In Canada, Mark Carney's victory in April was powered by the female vote. Even in an election dominated by Trump, the parties were polarised along gender lines. The gender voting gap is likely to have been the largest in Canadian history, says Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant from Queen's University, Ontario. A poll before the vote showed the Conservatives leading by five points among men while the centre-left Liberals had a 25 per cent lead among women – an overall 30 per cent gender gap. Women were central to Anthony Albanese's re-election in Australia this month: pre-election polls found that men aged 18-34 were 10 per cent more likely to vote Conservative. The strongest predictor of seats with a higher Green vote was a greater number of university-educated women, Dr Intifar Chowdhury from Flinders University has found. The most divided country on the planet Nowhere is the gender divide more extreme than South Korea. There, on top of the underlying forces driving the sexes apart elsewhere, two particularly toxic issues deepen the political gender chasm. South Korea has the largest gender pay gap in the developed world – 29 per cent – creating anger among highly educated women. Men, in turn, are angry by the requirement to do 18 months' military service. 'Especially after the 2008 economic crisis, you have huge competition for jobs,' says Heejung Chung, who grew up in South Korea and is professor of work and employment at King's College London. 'Opportunities for young people in general, both men and women, have significantly declined. 'Women are going into higher education in higher numbers. A lot of young men feel like, 'We're actually in a worse state than women.'' In the 2022 presidential election, the Right-wing candidate Yoon Suk Yeol particularly courted young men. Yoon claimed that men were being treated like 'potential sex criminals', and denied the existence of systemic discrimination against women. While men and women over 40 showed minimal voting differences, Yoon won 59 per cent of men under 30, yet just 34 per cent of young women. As president, Yoon discontinued funding for programmes aimed at addressing sexism and removed the term 'gender equality' from the school ethics curriculum. And at 10.27pm on December 3 last year, Yoon declared martial law. Four days after the declaration, a nationwide rally demanded Yoon's impeachment. Yet crowds were overwhelmingly female. Only about one tenth of all pro-impeachment protestors were men. The greatest determinant of how people viewed the most seismic event in South Korea since the introduction of democracy was their gender. Now, on June 3, these divisions will surface once again. South Korea is holding its next presidential election, brought forward by Yoon's removal from office. The vote is likely to see a similar gender gap on Left-Right lines to previous elections, Chung believes. South Korea offers a stark warning, pointing to a future in Britain and around the world in which, rather than young people of both sexes prospering together, they increasingly see their interests at war with each other. Baby busts The consequences of such gender polarisation go far beyond politics. A chasm between the sexes in the ballot box is also bad for the future of humanity itself. Today, South Korea has the world's lowest birth rate: just 0.72 births per woman. This is almost certainly the lowest birth rate in any country in peacetime in human history. Births are even less common in Seoul: the capital's birth rate is 0.55, the lowest of any city in the world. Korea's population is projected to halve by the year 2100, creating a financial and demographic crisis. The government has spent more than $250 billion on programmes to encourage people to start families, to little avail. One third of women say they do not want to get married, compared with only 13 per cent of men. Remarkably, only 34 per cent of women aged 25-29 say that they want to have children. 'More women are saying that having a marriage or having children is not a prerequisite for a good life,' Chung observes. 'That makes men angrier.' It turns out that men and women divided by politics have little wish to couple up – or to reproduce.
BBC News
07-05-2025
- Sport
- BBC News
MCC set to address 'ridiculous' gender divide at AGM to increase women members
The Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) is set to formulate plans to drastically increase the number of women members in an attempt to address what senior club figures have called a "ridiculous" gender divide. A discussion on the subject of female membership has been slated on the agenda for the club's Annual General Meeting (AGM) at Lord's on Wednesday. The MCC voted to allow women to join the club in 1998, having been an all-male preserve for more than two centuries. But of its current 18,350 full members, fewer than 3% are women. At a pre-AGM meeting last month, leading MCC committee figures were left exasperated at just how slow progress has been. Sources at the MCC have since told BBC Sport it is "frankly ridiculous" that so few members are women and the issue is one the club cannot ignore but must "meet head on". Frustrations have centred on how to make non-playing membership available to more women, with the club largely hamstrung by a lengthy waiting list which currently stands at approximately 29 years. A paper has been prepared in advance of the AGM and the meeting will be used as a platform to discuss the issue, gather the views of members and devise a model to reduce the gender divide. While the AGM will test the water it is understood leading MCC figures are resolutely determined to develop practical solutions.
