It has long been the case that American women are generally more liberal than American men. But among young Americans, this gender gap has widened into an enormous rift: According to recent Gallup polling, there is a 30-point differencebetween the number of women age 18–30 who self-identify as liberal and the number of men in that demographic who do the same.
That’s largely because young women have gotten much more liberal, while young men have stayed ideologically more consistent—or, according to other analyses, become more conservative and anti-feminist. (Of course, not every person identifies as a man or woman. But gender roles still play a big part in shaping our lives and politics, and in the context of this column, I am focusing mostly on the vast majority of Americans who identify as one or the other.) It’s not happening just here either; the political divide between the sexes is a trend that researchers are observing in some other countries too.
I was watching a video about the phenomenon of men getting more conservative - which is happening globally - and one of the men who is doing a lot of work on improving it said that men can take on roles of caretakers and househusbands because those are possible now.
To me, that rings a bit hollow because for decades women have been struggling to get out of those roles because they’re not respected by society regardless of who does them. Saying that men now have the option to take them on doesn’t feel like a solid argument.
They made a lot of interesting points and covered a lot of reasons why men and boys are falling behind, especially in education, but that part felt like he hadn’t thought it the whole way through.