The Great Divergence: Why Young Men and Women No Longer See the Same World

In January 2024, the Financial Times published a set of charts that, for a brief and disorienting moment, made the Western world pay attention to something other than artificial intelligence. John Burn-Murdoch, the paper’s chief data reporter, mapped the ideological positions of young men and young women across a dozen countries, tracking their trajectories from 2000 to 2023. The lines diverged like a pair of scissors opening. In South Korea, the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom, young women had moved sharply — in some cases dramatically — to the left. Young men had either stayed put or drifted rightward. The gap between them was not a crack. It was a canyon (Burn-Murdoch, 2024).

The 2024 US presidential election offered the starkest electoral expression of this divide. Donald Trump carried men aged 18-29 by thirteen percentage points. Kamala Harris carried women of the same age by an almost identical margin. Among voters under thirty, men and women effectively cancelled each other out — not because both were moderate, but because both were polarised in opposite directions (AP VoteCast, 2024). It was the widest gender gap among young voters in modern American history.

In South Korea, the phenomenon has gone further than anywhere else on earth. The 4B movement — bihon (no marriage), bichulsan (no childbirth), biyeonae (no dating), bisekseu (no sex) — has attracted hundreds of thousands of young women who have simply opted out of heterosexual relationships altogether (Jeong, 2023). South Korea’s total fertility rate fell to 0.72 in 2023, the lowest of any major country in recorded demographic history (Statistics Korea, 2024). Young Korean men, meanwhile, have swung hard toward the anti-feminist People Power Party, propelling the conservative Yoon Suk-yeol to the presidency in 2022 on a platform that included abolishing the Ministry of Gender Equality (Kim, 2022).

For most of history, men and women disagreed about household chores, child-rearing, and whose turn it was to deal with the in-laws. They did not, as a rule, disagree about the fundamental nature of society. That era is over.

This is the story of how the sexes came to inhabit different political universes, why history offers almost no precedent for what is happening, and what the consequences will be if the gap continues to widen.

The Data: A Chasm Across the Developed World

The scale of the divergence is remarkable not for its existence — small ideological gaps between men and women have been measured since at least the 1960s — but for its velocity and breadth.

In the United States, Gallup’s annual ideology survey shows that 44 per cent of women aged 18-29 identified as liberal in 2023, compared with 25 per cent of men of the same age — a 19-point gap that has roughly tripled since 2000 (Gallup, 2024). Among Americans over fifty, the gap between men and women is a modest four to six points. The divergence is generational, not biological. Something happened to young people specifically.

The European Social Survey tells a similar story. In Germany, young women aged 18-29 are 30 percentage points more likely than young men to describe themselves as left-leaning (European Social Survey, 2023). In the United Kingdom, the gap among the same age cohort is 25 points. In Sweden — a country that once prided itself on gender consensus — it is 22 points (Burn-Murdoch, 2024). Across nearly every European nation where reliable data exists, the pattern holds: young women moving left, young men remaining where they were or shifting right.

The disagreements cluster around a specific set of issues. On gender identity, immigration, social justice, and criminal justice, the gap between young men and young women ranges from 15 to 30 percentage points in most Western democracies (Pew Research Center, 2024). On narrowly economic questions — taxation, government spending, pensions — the gap is much smaller, typically five to ten points. This is not a conventional left-right split. It is a values split, centred on identity, culture, and the role of institutions in adjudicating between competing claims to fairness.

Richard Reeves, in Of Boys and Men (2022), was among the first to frame this divergence as a structural phenomenon rather than a passing mood. Young men and young women, he argued, are not simply choosing different political teams. They are responding rationally to different lived experiences. Women are outperforming men academically at every level. They are entering professional careers in greater numbers. They have legitimate grievances about harassment, safety, and reproductive autonomy. Men — particularly men without university degrees — are falling behind economically, dying younger, struggling in education, and receiving almost no institutional sympathy for any of it. Both sexes have genuine reasons for discontent. The tragedy is that their discontents now point in opposite directions.

The generational specificity is crucial. Among Americans over fifty, the ideological gender gap is modest — four to six points in most surveys. Among Germans over fifty, it is negligible. The divergence is not between men and women as such. It is between young men and young women — those who came of age after the 2008 financial crisis, after the smartphone revolution, after the #MeToo movement. Something in the water changed around 2012, and it changed differently for each sex.

What makes the current moment so striking is not that men and women disagree. It is that they disagree more than at any point for which we have reliable survey data — and the gap shows no sign of closing.

Historical Precedents — Or Lack Thereof

One might reasonably expect history to be littered with episodes in which men and women held sharply different political views. In fact, it is remarkably sparse. For most of human history, women’s political opinions were either not recorded, not solicited, or not considered to matter. And when women did finally enter the electorate, the initial evidence ran in precisely the opposite direction of today’s narrative.

When women obtained the right to vote — in 1893 in New Zealand, 1918 in Britain (partially), 1920 in the United States — they were, by most measures, more conservative than men, not less. The suffragette movements had been driven by activists with broadly progressive aims, but the mass of newly enfranchised women tended to be churchgoing, domestically focused, and wary of radical change. In the 1928 British general election — the first in which all women over 21 could vote — the Conservative Party benefited substantially from the expanded female electorate (Pugh, 2000). Anti-suffragists had warned that giving women the vote would usher in socialism. Instead, it produced a Conservative landslide. History, as ever, has a sense of humour.

This conservative tendency persisted for decades. Through the 1950s, women in the United States, Britain, France, and West Germany were reliably more conservative than men on most issues. They attended church more regularly, supported law-and-order politics more enthusiastically, and were more sceptical of trade unions (Inglehart and Norris, 2003). The “gender gap” in politics, when it first appeared as a measurable phenomenon in the 1980 US presidential election, was initially discussed as a curiosity: why had women suddenly started voting differently from men?

The deeper historical forces that reshaped women’s political identity were material, not ideological. Two world wars slaughtered roughly 80 million people, the overwhelming majority of them young men. The loss was so catastrophic that it physically reorganised society. In France after the First World War, 10.5 per cent of the male labour force was dead and another 30 per cent wounded (Becker, 2010). In the Soviet Union after the Second, the sex ratio among those born between 1920 and 1925 was 0.59 — fewer than six surviving men for every ten women (Andreev et al., 2002). Women did not enter the workforce because they had read feminist theory. They entered because there were not enough men left alive to run the factories, staff the hospitals, or drive the trains. Necessity accomplished what ideology had merely imagined.

But the single most transformative event in the history of gender relations was pharmacological, not political. The approval of the combined oral contraceptive pill in 1960 — and its subsequent mass adoption across the developed world — severed the link between sex and reproduction more completely than any social movement could have managed. Claudia Goldin, who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics for her work on women’s labour market participation, demonstrated that the pill did not merely allow women to delay childbirth. It fundamentally altered their investment horizon (Goldin, 2023). A woman who could reliably control her fertility could invest in a long professional education — law school, medical school, a PhD — knowing that a pregnancy would not derail her plans. The downstream consequences — women’s rising educational attainment, their growing economic independence, their shifting political priorities — all trace back, in substantial part, to a small packet of synthetic oestrogen.

There is, however, another historical pattern worth considering — one rather less edifying. Sex-ratio imbalances have, throughout history, been profoundly destabilising. Societies with a substantial surplus of young men tend to be more violent, more politically volatile, and more prone to authoritarian movements. The American frontier in the nineteenth century, with its extreme male-to-female ratio, was not a model of democratic deliberation. It was a shooting gallery. Post-revolutionary France, with its population of surplus men returning from the Napoleonic Wars, was convulsed by political instability for decades (Hudson and den Boer, 2004). Modern China, where the one-child policy produced an estimated 30-40 million “surplus” males, faces challenges of social cohesion that its leadership discusses only in euphemisms (Hvistendahl, 2011). The parallel is imperfect — the current Western divergence is ideological, not numerical — but the underlying mechanism rhymes. When large numbers of young men feel they have no stake in the prevailing social order, they do not politely request reforms. They vote for disruptors, retreat into subcultures, or — in the worst cases — turn to violence. The populist surges that have convulsed Western democracies since 2016 are disproportionately male phenomena. Trump, Brexit, Bolsonaro, Meloni, Milei — in each case, the strongest support came from men who felt the system had left them behind. The gender divergence is not separate from the populist moment. It is one of its primary engines.

Why Now? Four Structural Drivers

The divergence is not the product of any single cause. It is the compound effect of at least four structural forces that arrived simultaneously and reinforced one another.

First, education. Women now outperform men academically at every level of every education system in the developed world. In Britain, girls outperform boys at GCSE, A-level, and degree classification (UCAS, 2024). In the United States, women have earned the majority of bachelor’s degrees since 1982, the majority of master’s degrees since 1987, and the majority of doctorates since 2006 (NCES, 2024). The gap is not small. In 2023, American women earned 59.5 per cent of all bachelor’s degrees — the widest margin ever recorded.

Universities are not politically neutral environments. Survey data consistently shows that the professoriate in the humanities and social sciences leans overwhelmingly left — in some departments, liberal-to-conservative ratios exceed 10:1 (Langbert, 2018). Students who attend university are exposed to several years of curricula shaped by these perspectives, alongside peer environments that reward progressive signalling. Students who do not attend university — disproportionately male, disproportionately working-class — receive no equivalent socialisation in any ideological direction. The education system does not merely teach young women to think differently from young men. It physically separates them into distinct intellectual environments for three to four formative years.

Second, social media. The algorithmic content ecosystems of TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and X sort users into parallel information universes with ruthless efficiency. A young woman who engages with content about feminism, body positivity, or social justice receives an accelerating stream of similar material. A young man who watches fitness content, gaming commentary, or Jordan Peterson clips receives an accelerating stream in the opposite direction. The algorithm does not care about balance or nuance. It optimises for engagement, and engagement is maximised by content that provokes strong emotional responses — which, in practice, means content that confirms and intensifies existing priors.

The consequences are measurable. Andrew Tate, before his arrest on trafficking charges, had accumulated over 11.6 billion views on TikTok — a figure that exceeds the combined viewership of most traditional media organisations (Reuters, 2023). His audience was overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly young. On the other side of the algorithmic divide, feminist and social justice content dominates the feeds of young women to a degree that would have been unthinkable before the smartphone era. Men and women under thirty are, in a quite literal sense, consuming different media, hearing different arguments, and forming different pictures of reality. They are not disagreeing about the same set of facts. They are operating from different sets of facts entirely.

Third, economic divergence. The decline of traditionally male industries — manufacturing, construction, mining, heavy engineering — has eliminated millions of jobs that once provided men without university degrees with stable, well-paid employment and a clear social role. In the United States, real median earnings for men with only a high school diploma fell by 12 per cent between 1979 and 2019 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020). Over the same period, real median earnings for women with a bachelor’s degree rose by 33 per cent. The economic trajectories have crossed. Women with degrees are, on average, earning more than men without them — a reversal that would have been incomprehensible two generations ago.

The human cost falls disproportionately on men. The “deaths of despair” documented by Anne Case and Angus Deaton — deaths from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholic liver disease — are overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly concentrated among men without university degrees, and overwhelmingly concentrated in regions where traditional industries have collapsed (Case and Deaton, 2020). In the United States, men are 3.5 times more likely than women to die by suicide (CDC, 2023). In the United Kingdom, men account for approximately 75 per cent of all suicides (ONS, 2024). These are not statistics that feature prominently in most discussions of gender inequality. A Martian reading the output of Western gender discourse would conclude that disadvantage runs exclusively in one direction. The Martian would be wrong.

Fourth, institutional asymmetry. The institutional infrastructure that addresses gender disadvantage — government ministries, university programmes, corporate diversity initiatives, NGOs — is almost exclusively oriented toward women’s advancement. This is not a conspiracy. It is the legacy of a centuries-long struggle for women’s rights that succeeded spectacularly. But the result is that young men who are struggling academically, economically, or psychologically find themselves in a world where no institution exists to advocate for them — and where the very act of asking for advocacy is treated as evidence of bad character.

The numbers are instructive. In the United Kingdom, there are more than 150 university scholarships specifically reserved for women, and precisely zero specifically for men — despite men now comprising only 43 per cent of university entrants (UCAS, 2024). The US Department of Education has a Women’s Educational Equity Act; it has no male equivalent. When Reeves proposed the creation of a White House Council on Boys and Men, the response from progressive commentators ranged from scepticism to derision (Reeves, 2022). The message received by many young men is unmistakable: your problems are not real problems, and raising them makes you part of the problem.

Into this vacuum rush the influencers. Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, and their countless imitators did not create the demand for male-oriented guidance. They merely supplied it. If mainstream institutions had offered young men a credible narrative about their place in the world — one that acknowledged their struggles without dismissing them as backlash — the market for misogynistic gurus would be considerably smaller. The failure is institutional, not individual.

Demographic and Political Consequences

If the ideological divergence between young men and women were merely a matter of survey data, it would be an academic curiosity. It is not. It is already reshaping the most fundamental structures of society: who partners with whom, who has children, and how nations are governed.

The dating market has, by most metrics, entered a period of structural dysfunction. In the United States, the share of men aged 18-30 who report having no sexual partner in the past year rose from 10 per cent in 2008 to 27 per cent in 2018 — a near-tripling (General Social Survey, 2018). Marriage rates across the developed world are at historic lows. In England and Wales, the marriage rate per thousand unmarried adults fell from 74.9 in 1972 to 18.6 in 2019 — a decline of 75 per cent (ONS, 2022). In South Korea, the number of marriages fell below 200,000 in 2022 for the first time in recorded history (Statistics Korea, 2023).

South Korea’s 4B movement is the most radical expression of this dysfunction, but it is not unique. In China, the tang ping (“lying flat”) movement among young men represents the male mirror image: a withdrawal from the competitive social structures — career advancement, property acquisition, marriage — that previous generations regarded as non-negotiable (Magistad, 2022). In Japan, the hikikomori phenomenon, in which an estimated 1.5 million young adults (predominantly male) have withdrawn from social life entirely, has persisted for two decades despite every government intervention (Cabinet Office of Japan, 2023). These are not identical phenomena, but they share a common root: a generation of young people who have concluded that the social contract on offer is not worth signing.

The political consequences are potentially graver still. If men and women increasingly vote as opposing blocs — not just leaning differently, but actively cancelling each other out — the arithmetic of democratic governance becomes structurally harder. Coalition formation depends on finding common ground across demographic groups. When the largest demographic divide in the electorate runs along the most intimate fault line in human society, the scope for compromise narrows dangerously.

History offers uncomfortable parallels. The Weimar Republic’s inability to form stable governing coalitions — a consequence of deep ideological fragmentation within the electorate — was among the conditions that enabled the rise of National Socialism. The United States in the 1850s, where northern and southern electorates held increasingly irreconcilable views on the fundamental question of human bondage, could not resolve its divide through normal democratic means. These are extreme examples, and the current situation is far less dire. But the structural logic is the same: when a polity’s major demographic groups cannot agree on basic values, governance defaults to either paralysis or domination. Neither is sustainable.

There is also the question of institutional legitimacy. When young men and young women hold fundamentally different views on what constitutes fairness — in criminal sentencing, in hiring, in speech, in the allocation of public resources — the institutions that adjudicate these questions lose their claim to neutrality. A court system that young women regard as too lenient and young men regard as too punitive cannot command the confidence of either. A university admissions process that young women regard as meritocratic and young men regard as rigged against them cannot claim legitimacy from both. Institutional trust, already at historic lows across the West, erodes further when the largest demographic divide runs through the heart of every contested question.

The demographic implications compound the political ones. Societies with sharply declining birth rates face labour shortages, pension crises, and an expanding ratio of dependants to workers. Japan, whose working-age population peaked in 1995, has spent three decades struggling with economic stagnation that is, in substantial part, demographic in origin (Yoshino and Taghizadeh-Hesary, 2019). South Korea, at current fertility rates, will see its population roughly halve by 2100 (UN Population Division, 2024). If ideological polarisation between the sexes is suppressing partnership and childbearing — and the data strongly suggests it is — then the gender divergence is not merely a culture-war talking point. It is a demographic event with civilisational stakes.

Where This Ends

The ideological divergence between young men and women is not a fashion. It is not a TikTok trend that will burn itself out in a news cycle. It is a structural shift driven by forces — educational, economic, technological, institutional — that show no sign of reversing.

Education systems will not spontaneously become less progressive. Social media algorithms will not spontaneously stop sorting users into ideological silos. The economic divergence between degree-holders and non-degree-holders will not spontaneously close. And the institutional asymmetry that devotes enormous resources to women’s advancement while largely ignoring men’s struggles will not correct itself without deliberate political will — which, in the current climate, is in conspicuously short supply.

The question is not whether the divergence will persist. It almost certainly will. The question is whether societies can accommodate it without fracturing. Can democratic systems function when their youngest cohort is split along gender lines more deeply than any other demographic divide? Can social solidarity survive when men and women increasingly regard each other not as partners in a shared project, but as political adversaries with incompatible values? Can birth rates stabilise when the sexes cannot agree on the basic terms of partnership?

History suggests that ideological chasms of this magnitude do eventually close — but rarely peacefully, and never quickly. The religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries resolved themselves, after approximately 130 years and perhaps eight million deaths, in the principle of cuius regio, eius religio — whose realm, his religion — and eventually in the secular state (Parker, 1984). The class conflicts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries resolved themselves, after two world wars and several revolutions, in the welfare state and mixed economy. Each resolution required the losing side to accept a settlement it found deeply uncomfortable, and the winning side to offer terms generous enough to be accepted.

No such settlement is yet visible on the horizon of the gender divergence. What is visible is two generations of young people — male and female — each convinced that the system is rigged against them, each armed with data to support the claim, and each increasingly disinclined to listen to the other. The gap was not created by op-eds, and it will not be closed by them. It was created by structural forces that reshaped education, the economy, the media, and the institutions that mediate between men and women. Until those structures change, the divergence will continue.

The scissors are still opening.