The dangers of the political gender gap

Throughout history, poverty, class and economic self-interest have driven radical political movements. The Bolsheviks harnessed the anger of impoverished workers and peasants to create a movement that controlled the world’s biggest country for seven decades. The Nazis came to power due to both the Great Depression and resentment towards a small but economically nimble Jewish community.

Today, extremist politics is not bubbling up primarily from the economically disaffected, as occurred both in medieval and modern times during periods of upheaval. The self-professed radicals of our age seem more driven by their own inner cultural angst and disturbed psychology.

This angst is now expressed increasingly with violence, from the well-funded campaign against weirdo-genius Elon Musk, which includes arson attacks on Teslas, to the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, the most destructive outbreak of civil disorder in US history, as well as the awful ‘January 6’ riots. Blood-curdling rhetoric now comes even from the once respectable political class. Democratic congresswoman Jasmine Crockett wants Musk ‘taken down’ and says that Democrats have to be ‘okay with punching’. One study suggests that nearly 38 per cent of respondents and over half of ‘progressives’ would see the assassination of Donald Trump as ‘justified’.

At the core of today’s political extremes lies a deep-seated social anxiety, fuelled by atomisation and alienation between the sexes. This is particularly true for the young women who have become the vanguard of so-called progressives. This can be seen in leftists’ support for Luigi Mangione, who allegedly murdered healthcare executive Brian Thompson. In California, a centre of lunacy, there is even a pending proposition on healthcare reform named after Mangione. Taylor Lorenz, a former star reporter at the Washington Post and New York Times, has called the alleged murderer ‘a morally good man’. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins was promoting a defence fund for Mangione before being shamed into taking it down. There is even a controversy about his ‘fangirls’, the young females who dominate the crowd at hearings about the case.

This division between men and women comes at a time when females are outpacing men in school and careers, leaving them with fewer potential partners, and are increasingly sceptical of marriage. Over 28 per cent of young US women, notes Gallup, identify as LGBTQ – more than twice the rate for older millennials. Over five per cent of US high-school students struggle with their gender identity, according to the CDC.

Alienated from traditional familial ties, young, educated and unattached women have become ever more prominent across the far left. Some even embrace violently homophobic and anti-feminist movements like Hamas and see no contradiction with their own supposedly progressive beliefs. A large, highly disproportionate segment of anti-Israel activists, notes researcher Eitan Hersh, consists of LGBTQ-identified people.

Indeed, college-educated women stand out as the ultimate leftist outliers in polls on everything from their support for DEI to their opposition to Trump, JD Vance and DOGE – especially when compared with the attitudes of college-educated men and non-college-graduate women. In 2024, they constituted Kamala Harris’s bulwark, while men and married women tilted more to the right. These patterns of female-led progressivism and even far-leftism can be seen in almost all developed countries.

The existence of a political gender gap is nothing new. But, according to recent Gallup surveys, America’s is now five times bigger than it was in 2000. As the percentage of female college graduates has grown by almost 30 per cent in recent decades, universities have become prime breeding grounds for anti-familial ideology. According to statistics from the National Centre for Education, the number of women’s and gender-studies degrees in the US has increased by more than 300 per cent since 1990. This is why it shouldn’t be a surprise that the vanguard of wokism consists of single women and, to a lesser extent, trans-identifying or nonbinary men.

This widening political gender gap also impacts men. They too are alienated from the opposite sex, as evidenced by shifting dating patterns and declining rates of marriage. In many countries, a lot of men are not even dating or spending any time at all with the opposite sex.

In Asia, in places like South Korea and Japan, where the trans trend may be less pronounced, men and women seem to be evolving into separate and often hostile races. In Japan, one in four people between the ages of 20 and 30 is a virgin. The Japanese even have a term – herbivores – for the passive, desexed generation of young men. In South Korea, 40 per cent of people in their 20s and 30s appear to have quit dating altogether, with the state now seeking to nudge the mutually reluctant sexes into meeting each other.

As with women, this sexual division already has political implications, albeit in the opposite direction. As women go left, more young men go right. In South Korea, the votes of young males were sufficient to put a right-wing ‘anti-feminist’ – now since impeached – into the presidency. In America, men increasingly back Donald Trump. Similarly, European males under 30 are also shifting to the right. In Germany, they favour the right-populist AfD at roughly twice the rate of their female counterparts. The AfD is the most popular party among young people overall.

The rightward drift of many young men has not been pretty. It has sometimes led to a growth in racist and anti-Semitic views. The growth of anti-Semitism may be strongest on the left, but it’s certainly gaining ground among younger voters on the right – a rise stoked by male-oriented right-wing media. This includes the podcasts of Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson, both of whom have hosted spurious ‘historians’ who deny the realities of the Holocaust and even suggest that Churchill, not Hitler, was the real villain of the Second World War.

To a generation only marginally acquainted with the facts of history, and lacking the means to combat this disinformation, this is very dangerous. Indeed, this emergent new right is increasingly characterised by a rejection of the Enlightenment and the scientific worldview. Ironically, some even seek to impose their own right-wing version of the detested ‘progressive’ cancel culture.

Like their female counterparts, the alienated young men of the reactionary right have lots of grievances. They face economies with few well-paying jobs, and many simply drop out of the workforce. While some women lament these men’s lack of ambition, those men in turn claim they find females remote and hostile. This chasm in attitudes has engendered what is widely described as a ‘sex recession’. At its worst, this fuels the violent anger of so-called incels – men, that is, without any enduring contact with women.

This sex / political divide suggests a difficult future for our society and institutions. Throughout history, male-female companionship and family have been critical to maintaining some degree of normalcy. As one seminal study from Singapore has noted, family buttresses not just society, but also serves as ‘the primary source of emotional, economic and financial support’ for individuals, and as the best way to ‘protect society from the negative fallouts’ of a competitive economy. Without a strong family structure, individuals can be cast adrift. Lacking social anchors, they become susceptible to manipulation from extremes or look to the state for comfort and support. As author Richard Reeves has noted: ‘You don’t upend a 12,000-year-old social order without experiencing cultural side effects.’

Bereft of family, children and even long-term partners, we are becoming a far lonelier society. This trend is backed up by the American Enterprise Institute’s ‘Survey on Community and Society’. This shows that 44 per cent of 18- to 29-year-olds report feeling completely alone at least sometimes, compared with just 19 per cent of 60- to 70-year-olds. Meanwhile, 50 per cent of younger Americans say they ‘sometimes’ feel isolated from others, compared with an appreciably lower 30 per cent of those 60 and older.

We are nurturing a generation that is isolated, alienated and potentially violent. Our societies are woefully unprepared for the upheaval this could lead to.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, a presidential fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute.