Why Women Have Become Much More Liberal Than Men - Daniel Cox

You are in the thick of it right now. That article that you wrote at the start of the year caused quite the ruckus.

Yeah, it did. Uh, and it's funny 'cause this is some research we've been doing for, you know, over a year. And, uh, often it just takes a single, uh, op-ed and people start paying attention.

How would you categorize the last couple of months for you and the sort of fallout?

Yeah, I mean, one of the really interesting things is people are debating just exactly the extent, uh, of the divide, the nature of it, what's going on. So you have a lot of pollsters like myself saying, "Hey, you know, this is kind of unprecedented what we're seeing, uh, young women becoming much more liberal." And demographically, we're seeing rapid changes when it comes to, like, LGBTQ identity, um, growing education divides between young men and young women. So there's a lot of things that are emerging or new, and the- the political divide is just one of those things. But there are the- the- the cold water throwers who, you know, largely, uh, political scientists who want to say, "Well, you know, hold on, let's, let's wait till we, you know, we can get some corroborating data." Um, but the fact of the matter is actually there's a lot of corroborating data already from a- a lot of really reliable sources that suggest that something is going on. And we can, I think, debate the margins around how extreme is the divide, how far apart are young men and young women and on what issues, but I think we can safely say that something really big is happening.

All right, so just how big is this ideological divide between young men and young women? What's happening?

So, uh, according to the Gallup data, which is some of the- the research that we've been using, uh, we conduct our own surveys at the Survey Center on American Life, but we also do look at a lot of different other polls from the Pew Research Center and places like Gallup that have really long and reliable trustworthy trends. And so Gallup shows beginning around 2014, 2015, this- this emerging, uh, ideological divide with young women becoming significantly more liberal, uh, around 42, 43%, uh, identify as liberal, uh, in the latest polls, and young men really haven't shifted all that much when it comes to their ideology. So there's a, you know, anywhere from a 12 to 14 point gap between them now.

Right. You've got at no time in the past quarter century has there been such a rapid divergence between the views of young men and young women.

Right. And, you know, as far as we know, uh, this is something that will continue to shape the way these folks relate to each other in terms of their, um, you know, priorities when it comes to, you know, the politicians that they want to, uh, nominate and elect and the issues that they care about. One of the really significant divisions we've seen is actually over the issue of abortion. And while both young men and young women tend to lean, uh, pretty significantly pro-choice, when it comes to the priorities of that issue, uh, we did a poll in 2022 right before the- the midterm elections, and 61% of young women said that abortion was a- a- a critical priority for them, but it was only like 30% of young men. So the- just in terms of what they care about and how much they care about it is really different.