26-05-2025
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 Now, these have been replaced by two new interrelated divides: gender and education.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.
