Are Young Men Really Becoming More Sexist?

Nearly 25 years ago, two prominent political scientists formally discovered a political gender gap. It had been an “established orthodoxy in political science” that women in advanced Western democracies were more right-wing than their male counterparts. But when Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris examined more than 60 countries across the world, they found that from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, women had been moving to the left. They predicted that this gender split would continue to grow, with women moving even further left in the future.

But the modern-day focus on this split is increasingly on the radicalization of young men—are they moving further to the right?

All around the world—from Poland, where the far-right party supported a total ban on abortion, to South Korea, where the #MeToo movement sparked a fierce backlash—political commentators are raising questions about whether young men are becoming less liberal and less gender egalitarian than their fathers and grandfathers.

It’s too soon to make any final judgments, and many of these data points about young men and their interest in the far right aren’t substantial enough to be more than suggestive. But just because we don’t have the gold standard of randomized, controlled trials that scholars like to have before saying anything definitively, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be learned about the topic.

My guest this week is Dr. Alice Evans, a researcher at Stanford University who has traveled the world investigating why some societies are more gender-equal than others. She draws on her research, personal interviews, and deep dives into survey data from dozens of countries around the world in this far-ranging interview about why young men may be feeling pulled toward right-wing radicalism.

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

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Jerusalem Demsas: This is Good on Paper. It’s a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. I’m your host, Jerusalem Demsas, and I’m a staff writer here at The Atlantic.

Narratives do a lot to drive what our world looks like. They shape how we see ourselves, how we see our fellow citizens, how our elected officials see us—and what they do in reaction to those narratives can have far-reaching consequences.

This show is about getting to the root of those narratives—about separating out what we actually know from what we can plausibly guess and from what has been wholesale constructed.

Doing this doesn’t mean you have to change your mind. In fact, sometimes we’ll conclude that narratives are around for a reason. But we should be clear where the facts end and the guesswork, opinions, and politics begin.

Today we’re talking about sexism—about whether it’s true that young men around the world are turning against the tide of gender egalitarianism.

In the year 2000, political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris released a paper establishing “gender differences in electoral behavior.” Basically, they showed that women had become a liberal force in small-D democratic politics.

It can be strange to think of it now, but that wasn’t always the case. In the postwar era, women were, on average, seen as a more conservative electoral factor. Norris and Inglehart looked at more than 60 countries around the world and found that from the early ’80s through the mid-90s, women had been moving to the left of men throughout advanced industrial societies.

And perhaps most significant was their finding that the gender gap was strongest among the younger age groups.

They conclude that “given the process of generational turnover this promises to have profound consequences for the future of the gender cleavage, moving women further left.”

Well, nearly a quarter of a century later, journalists, politicians, and policymakers are asking whether a new iteration of the gender gap is here: with young women going even further left, yes, but also young men turning further right—maybe even further right than their fathers and grandfathers.

For instance, in Poland, the far-right party Confederation, which has been described as anti-feminist and supporting a total ban on abortion, garnered significant support from young men.

There’s a broad sense that views on social issues get more progressive in younger generations. But I’ve now seen a number of data points suggesting that might not be true.

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And I want to be clear: We don’t have the kind of broad, definitive survey data or social-science research to say conclusively that young men are or aren’t moving to the right. And, of course, throughout this episode, we’re often speaking in averages and generalities, which can obscure the full range of opinions that different individuals have. Put another way—and without any irony here—not all men.

But to open up this conversation and try and untangle the many threads, I’ve invited an academic whose work I’ve been following: Dr. Alice Evans is a visiting scholar at Stanford University, and she’s working on a book that encapsulates some of her many travels around the world studying why some societies are more gender-equal than others.

Alice, welcome to the show!

Alice Evans: Thank you so much. It’s a real pleasure to talk to you because I think we corresponded for a long time, and this is a treat.

Yes, yes. Twitter DM-to-podcast pipeline. I feel like that’s what