The political gender divide is transforming how young Americans organize, vote, and interact with each other.
Young men stand for the US national anthem at a campaign event for Donald Trump in 2024
(Heather Khalifa/Bloomberg via Getty Images) Marina Martinez believes that small gestures can make a difference. That’s part of why the University of Oregon sophomore joined her school’s chapter of the Citizen’s Climate Lobby, a national organization dedicated to advocating for effective climate solutions in Congress.
Martinez, who is the group’s secretary, said the club is open to anyone on campus interested in climate advocacy. However, of the 25 regular members of the group, none are men.
“There just seems to be a greater number of women wanting to take real, everyday political action on the left,” Martinez said.
Martinez’s observation might not only apply to his club. Across the country, young women are becoming more and more liberal. On the other hand, their male counterparts are not.
According to a Gallup poll released in 2024, 40% of American women aged 18 to 29 identified as liberal, the highest percentage in decades. In comparison, only 25 percent of men in this same age group identified as liberal.
“It’s just a huge difference these days,” said Marc Hetherington, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies the dynamics of the American electorate.
Current number
Hetherington said this political “gender gap” is largely due to the behaviors of young women. Because not only are young women more liberal than young men, they are far more liberal than women of other generations. And this trend is increasing, according to past data Gallup Polls.
Between 2001 and 2007, an average of 28 percent of women aged 18 to 29 identified as liberal. Then, between 2008 and 2016, this average increased to 32%.
The most recent data period – 2017 to 2024 – shows that 40% of young women in this age range identify as liberal. This represents an increase of 12 points in 23 years.
“Women under 30 really stand out as being different from women in older cohorts,” Hetherington said.
But the young men did not follow the same pattern. Over the past 25 years, the percentage of men ages 18 to 29 who identify as liberal has fluctuated, but generally hovers between 20 and 30 percent. In 2001, 25 percent of men in this age group identified as liberal – the same percentage who identify as liberal today.
For Khasya Tinglin, a student at the University of Texas at Austin, the numbers aren’t surprising. She studies rhetoric and writing, but studied international relations during her first two years of college. Before changing majors, she said she frequently noticed this divide in her classes.
In many of her required courses, which often involved the disciplines of political science and international relations, Tinglin said she found that male students were more likely to express conservative views. She said this becomes especially noticeable during class discussions about current events and foreign conflicts.
“It was a very unempathetic and emotionless way of seeing the world,” Tinglin said. “There are multiple perspectives when you look at international relations. You can always bring up the state argument, but it’s about people’s real lives.”
Hetherington said one possible reason for the growing political gender gap could be that support for many women’s issues, such as reproductive rights and gender equality, has become distinctly partisan.
“In my generation, when we were young, there wasn’t a big difference between Republicans and Democrats on gender issues,” Hetherington said. “And to the extent that there was a difference, it was actually kind of an opening in the 1980s.”
One example cited by Hetherington is the 1976 presidential election. During the race, Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter and Republican candidate Gerald Ford were pro-life and expressed personal opposition to abortion.
A few years earlier, when the United States Supreme Court ruled Roe v. Wadeit was Justice Harry Blackmun who wrote the majority opinion, which held that a woman’s right to abortion was protected by the right to privacy. Blackmun, along with four other justices in a 7-2 majority, was appointed by a Republican president.
“These things have changed a lot since the 1980s, but these kinds of changes take time,” Hetherington said. “So when we were politically socialized, the choice between parties was not so difficult.”
But that political context is very different from the one in which today’s young women grew up, Hetherington said. Instead, they saw a conservative Supreme Court with a majority of Republican-appointed justices overturn the decision. Roe v. Wade.
Hetherington said other gender issues, such as women’s rights and equality initiatives, have also become more partisan over the past 20 to 30 years. Women, he says, are therefore more likely to flock to the party that defends these rights.
Maggie Oliver, a political science major at Pace University, said gender issues such as access to reproductive health care influenced why she became politically active.
Oliver, who works on the campaign of Alex Flores, the Democratic candidate in New York’s 12th Congressional District, is a registered Democrat and describes herself as left-leaning. She said this was determined in part by her own personal experiences.
“Young men specifically have the luxury of not having to worry about the same things that I feel like I saw myself worrying about growing up,” Oliver said. “I had to think about contraception when I was 15, as did menstruation health care. »
But Hetherington said the Democratic Party’s focus on gender issues could alienate young men. “There’s an old definition of politics that comes from a guy named Harold Laswell, and he defined politics as who gets what, when and how,” Hetherington said. “When men see what the Democratic Party seems to be offering, when it comes to gender issues, they feel like there’s not much to offer them.”
Partisan support for gender issues is likely not the only reason for the growing political gender gap. Education could also play a role.
Data from the Pew Research Center shows that since the late 1990s, American women have surpassed men in college education.
Currently, 47 percent of women aged 25 to 34 have a bachelor’s degree, compared to just 37 percent of men. Women exceed men in earning a bachelor’s degree in all major racial and ethnic groups, although the size of the gap varies.
Surveys by the Pew Research Center have found that education is strongly associated with partisanship. The results showed that adults who earned a four-year college degree are significantly more likely to identify with the Democratic Party, suggesting that education may be contributing to young women’s leftward shift.
Hetherington says young men’s ideology also influences elections. Indeed, Preston Hill, who served as president of the UNC-Chapel Hill Young Republicans club during the 2025-2026 academic year, said he believes male demographics are a secret weapon for candidates.
For what? He mentions the 2024 elections.
During the elections, young men shifted sharply to the right. According to an analysis by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, about 56% of men ages 18 to 29 voted for President Donald Trump, a sharp turnaround from 2020, when about the same number supported Joe Biden. By comparison, 40% of young women in the same age group voted for Trump in 2024.
It was the first time a majority of young male voters supported a Republican presidential candidate since the election of George HW Bush in 1988.
According to Hill, this demographic of young men feels “left behind” by the Democratic Party and dissatisfied with the Biden administration on issues such as the economy and immigration. And during this period of discontent, Hill said conservatives were offering young men a seemingly better deal.
That was the case for Kai Lindsey, a junior at UT-Austin. Lindsey said he, alongside some of his male peers, feels “swept away” by liberal ideologies that he says are becoming more extreme.
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“When it comes to things like affirmative action and hiring, some of that rhetoric has definitely pushed me a little bit to view conservative ideology as more tolerant or more concerned with my personal issues,” Lindsey said.
Hill said she particularly noticed gender being targeted in the 2024 presidential election. While Trump accepted the invitation to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast, which is aimed primarily at young men, Kamala Harris did not. In contrast, she campaigned primarily among female influencers and touted the support of Taylor Swift.
“In the end, I think it paid off more for Trump to go after younger men,” Hill said.
Briana Edwards, a graduate research assistant at the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media, said the type of content young men consume, like Rogan’s podcast, likely influences their conservative orientation. According to Edwards, much of the online content aimed at young men is part of the manosphere, an ecosystem of toxic online male communities, which she studied for her master’s thesis. This political content, she says, manipulates young men’s feelings of being ignored by the political system and puts someone in charge: women.
“It’s misplaced blame,” Edwards said. “I explained it as men look at women. They look horizontally rather than vertically. They need to look at the systems that are acting on them and look side by side at the women who are facing the same experiences as those in this country, but managing them.”
According to Edwards, there are several subgroups of content that permeate the manosphere. All of this is not inherently political. The ideologies that she was Audiences in the manosphere include Christian nationalism, men’s rights activism and anti-woke rhetoric, but Edwards said that even content that is not outwardly political tends to emphasize conservative values. Many ideas in the manosphere revolve around the desire to return to traditional gender norms and values. This nostalgia for the past is something Edwards said many Republican candidates exploit in their rhetoric.
“I think Trump, RFK and the broader manosphere are doing it very well,” Edwards said. “’Make America Great Again.’ “Make America Healthy Again.” “Let’s return to traditional gender norms. “I think people want to imagine a world where things could be better. But instead of imagining or speculating about what the future might be, we look at what the past was – what we think it was. There is this weaponization of nostalgia. I think both groups do it very well.
As more young men consume this content, Edwards said they are increasingly disconnected from young women, both politically and socially.
For some young adults, this is reflected in their relationships. Lea Martin, a sophomore at the University of Oregon, said political disagreements contributed to her decision to end a relationship with a romantic partner.
“He identified himself as liberal, but did not actually vote in the general election. [2024 presidential] election,” Martin said. “He put no action behind his words. It was just disappointing.
Martin grew up in a politically active family. She attended her first protest at age 8 and continued to participate in marches and rallies of women defending the academy as she grew up. Now she feels that her political views are more than just beliefs: they are part of her value system.
“I would say I’m definitely very liberal,” Martin said. “I believe that everyone deserves equal rights and that the environment deserves to be protected. I could never be as close to someone who doesn’t have the same philosophy.”
A recent study from the University of California, Irvine, found that 37 percent of Americans report experiencing a “political breakup” with friends, partners, or family members at some point in their lives. The study suggests the trend could accelerate, particularly since the 2024 election.
This comes at a time when women are staying single longer and delaying having children. Using historical Census Bureau data, Morgan Stanley predicted that 45% of women ages 25 to 44 will be single by 2030, which would be the largest proportion in history.
Lindsey said he worries about the long-term consequences of the growing divide between young men and young women.
“With this growing ideological divide, when people think about starting a family, I think there’s a disconnect,” Lindsey said. “There is a growing divide between husbands and wives, where the man may have certain expectations of his wife that the wife does not want to adhere to or, or vice versa. I firmly believe in the idea that getting married and having children is objectively a good thing for the country. Seeing the ideological differences between men and women colliding, I think, is a very bad sign.”
Rue Siddiqui, a student at DePaul University in Chicago, said she also worries about growing polarization. That’s part of why she founded the DePaul chapter of BridgeUSA, a student movement designed to combat political division by championing diverse viewpoints and responsible discourse.
The club meets twice a month to discuss a pre-selected topic, which in the past has included issues such as immigration, DEI initiatives and local Chicago issues. During the discussions, Siddiqui says all points of view are welcome. A board moderates all conversations to ensure they remain productive.
And while Siddiqui noticed that most members who discuss more conservative positions tend to be male students, she also noticed something else. At the end of the meetings, all participants can leave, not necessarily with a change of mind, but with a feeling of mutual respect.
Siddiqui said she hopes the same could eventually be true for young men and women.
“When it comes to men and women, these differences may never go away,” Siddiqui said. “I’m not saying they never will. But until we can talk to each other, nothing will really change.”
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Alice Scott Alice Scott is a 2026 Puffin Writing Fellow for The nation. She studies journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has been published by PBS News Hour, Texas Highways magazine, and the Austin, American Statesman.