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Following recent reports of a growing gender divide among Gen Z, Natasha Radmehr examines if political ideology of young men and women is increasingly….
Baby boomers bought their million-pound houses for a tenner and owe their prosperity to good timing rather than hard graft. Millennials are snowflakes who eat too many avocados.
Every generation is characterised by sweeping, often unkind, generalisations – but if recent research is anything to go by, Gen Z may prove harder to stereotype.
That’s because it is a generation divided. New data suggests a gender split is emerging between the under-thirties. According to analysis of global sociopolitical trends by the data journalist John Burn-murdoch, Gen Z (people born between 1997 and 2012) now comprises two distinct camps, as young women increasingly identify with progressive, left-leaning ideologies while their male peers drift further towards the conservative right. Burn-murdoch discovered that in the UK, women aged between 18 and 30 are more liberal than their male counterparts by 25 percentage points. This chimes with findings from King’s College London which show that young men are less positive than young women about the impact of feminism, and are more likely than women to believe that the misogynistic online influencer Andrew Tate raises important points about threats to male identity and gender roles. So why the schism? The rise of feminism as a mainstream movement serves as an important backdrop to this shift. “I think that’s been one of the biggest changes in the last two decades,” says Filipa Melo Lopes, a social and political philosophy lecturer – and millennial – who teaches at the University of Edinburgh. “In the early noughties, it seemed that nobody was a feminist. Then all of a sudden, lots of celebrities became feminists and it almost became the default way of self-identification for a lot of young women.” Melo Lopes adds that this has coincided with a time of increasing political polarisation, pointing to Donald Trump’s presidency in the US and Brexit in the UK as examples. As a result, feminist issues have been woven into the discourse around broader, frequently divisive, political events. “People who are 20 years old have come of age in a polarised world where politics is about gender, and gender is a very salient axis of political affiliation and discussion,” she explains.
This is the landscape that fostered the Me Too movement, which finally came to a head in 2017. Powerful men such as Harvey Weinstein were held to account for an avalanche of sexual abuse allegations. Women had a voice; men were told to listen. A fictional story in the New Yorker called Cat Person went viral in which the protagonist, Margot, consents to sex with an older man to avoid seeming “spoiled and capricious”. It resonated with many women.
“What jumped out at me was the distance between women and men – the battle online was about how men didn’t get it,” says Melo Lopes, whose PHD analysed Cat Person. “There was this idea that women inhabited the world in a way that men would never understand.”
Jordan Peterson, a controversial psychologist, capitalised
People who are 20 years old have come of age in a polarised world where politics is about gender, and gender is a very salient axis of political affiliation and discussion
on this fracture. He used his Youtube channel to speak out against the Me Too movement, argue in favour of a patriarchal society and deny the existence of white privilege. Although by this point the manosphere – the name given to online spaces occupied by men who believe feminism is ruining the world – was already well-established, it wasn’t the kind of place many would admit to lurking in. Peterson, however, became someone who was simultaneously revered by the manosphere and given airtime on Channel 4. As a soft-spoken academic, he was able to infiltrate mainstream spaces and capture the attention of men who didn’t necessarily identify as extremists in their worldview but who were experiencing a crisis of masculinity and felt dispossessed. “Gender has become a mobilising factor in radicalisation to both the far-right and jihadist ideologies. Many of
the young men I have spoken to who became involved in Islamophobic far-right activism were motivated by social change going on around them. “They felt there was a pushback against a male privilege that they themselves believed they had not experienced,” says Elizabeth Pearson, programme lead for the Master’s in Terrorism and Counter Terrorism Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London, and author of Extreme Britain: Gender, Masculinity and Radicalisation. “When people talked about how men have had too much power for too long, they didn’t think this was a fair judgment because they didn’t feel they had ever had power. They did not recognise that men’s power is structural, not personal.”
Pearson notes that women are drawn to illiberalism too, such as Jayda Fransen, the far-right politician formerly involved with Britain First. Pearson doesn’t think it is necessarily helpful to frame gender relations as a power struggle; that it doesn’t reflect how most people live their lives. “The problem with framing it as men versus women is that the conversation gains traction in spaces that rely on polarisation rather than nuance, such as social media,” says Pearson. “And that’s what worries me. When people feel they don’t have a voice or representation in society, they feel a sense of inclusion in being online. But social media spaces are not a place for authentic discussion. There is disinformation; we don’t know what is real or who is real. Arguments are very black-and-white because that’s what gets results.”
This rings true for Keiran Watt, a 28-year-old student from Glasgow. He has noticed an increase in the number of people in his online network promoting the views of Andrew Tate, even after Tate was charged with rape and human trafficking.
“I think a big problem is that people like Andrew Tate deal in shareable one-sentence soundbites and solutions. You know, if men feel disillusioned and disenfranchised then it’s very convenient to just say OK, that’s because women are the problem,” says Watt. “What scares me is that I don’t know anyone who has only dipped their toe into this toxic way of thinking. They dive in and make it their entire personality, at least online. I’ve had to cut contact with guys I went to school with because of what they post.” Gen Z has never known life without the internet. They spend an average of four hours looking at their smartphones every day, so what they see online inevitably shapes both how they view the world and how they view themselves. Many were forced to retreat further into a virtual world during the pandemic, so it’s possible that this increased time spent in polarised spaces during their formative years exacerbated the ideological gender split now being reported in multiple countries.
Can it be combated? Melo Lopes thinks so. “There are ways of framing feminism that can help bridge the gap without giving up any of its critical edge or its denunciation of power inequalities,” she says. “Perhaps there are also ways of regulating our online world and some of the worrisome features of algorithms. We should think, too, about promoting more in-person interaction and dialogue.” It could well be that the biggest chasm exists not between the genders, but between their physical and digital lives.