Political Observer
Jun 08, 2025
Headline: The divide in tomorrow’s Britain: power women and powerless men
Sub-headline: Young women in the UK are now, for the first time, more likely to be in education, employment or training
If you’re losing the game, change the rules. It’s a strategy my six-year-old swears by. But it’s also Labour’s plan for the next election. Sir Keir Starmer recently confirmed that the party remains committed to lowering the voting age to 16 — a manifesto pledge that was expected to add hundreds of thousands of voters to the Labour tally (which is of course why it was in the manifesto in the first place).
At the last election, Labour won a stonking 42 per cent of the youth vote: next were the Lib Dems, all the way down on 18. But since then something weird has happened. The latest polling by More in Common has Labour on 30 per cent among 18 to 24-year-olds — still in the lead, but only just ahead of the Greens on 27 per cent. Reform, meanwhile, are on 22 per cent. In other words, a full half of the youth vote is now going to the populist parties of left and right. Which probably isn’t what those manifesto writers had in mind.
In many ways, this isn’t much of a surprise. As I’ve pointed out before, age is now the key fault line in British politics: the Tories, in particular, are so reliant on the grey vote that their supporters’ average age, as the US pollster Frank Luntz puts it, is “deceased”.
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At the last election, twice as many young women as men voted Green, and twice as many young men as women voted Reform. The John Smith Centre has found that young women are far more likely to cite the NHS as a key political issue; young men are focused on crime and immigration.
Again, this is a pattern replicated internationally. The journalist John Burn-Murdoch recently pointed out the astonishing gender divide in the South Korean election. Among young men, the left-right split was 24-74. Among young women, it was 58-36. And as he says, you can see a similar (though less dramatic) tendency in countries across the West — including the UK.The traditional explanation for this is that young men have been captured by the “manosphere” — a generation sitting alone in their basements, in thrall to steroidal podcasters like Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate. But again, there’s also an economic explanation.
Editor: Look at the approach of The Economist to the territory that Mr. Colevile attempts to diagnose? Consider that the political/sexual/career asperations of men and women are central to The Economist, and Mr. Colevile interventions. In sum ‘The Battle of The Sexes’ is reinvigerated as The West sinks deeper into its collapse, as Russia, China, Iran and BRICS define what the future might be …
In a trendy food market in Warsaw, Poland’s capital, two female engineers are discussing how hard it is to meet a nice, enlightened man. Paulina Nasilowska got a big pay rise a few years ago. Her boyfriend asked: “Did you have an affair with your boss?” He is now an ex-boyfriend.
Ms Nasilowska’s friend, Joanna Walczak, recalls a man she met on Tinder who revealed that he was a “red-pill” guy (a reference to “The Matrix”, a film, meaning someone who sees reality clearly. In the “manosphere”, a global online community of angry men, it means realising that men are oppressed.) He thought household chores and child care were women’s work, and that women could not be leaders. They didn’t have a second date.
Typically for young Polish women, Ms Nasilowska and Ms Walczak support parties of the liberal left, which take women’s issues seriously and promise to legalise abortion. Young Polish men, they complain, hew more to the right, or even to the far right. Consider last year’s election. Then the top choice for 18- to 29-year-old men was Confederation, a party that touts free-market economics and traditional social values. (“Against feminists. In defence of real women” is one of its slogans.) Some 26% of young men backed it; only 6% of their female peers did.
Young Polish men have their own set of complaints. Feminism has gone too far, say two firemen in their 20s in a small town. Lukasz says he used to be able to go to a village dance party and “the women there were wife material.” Nowadays “they’re all posting shameless pictures of themselves on social media,” he laments. The media are “all biased and pushing the culture to the left”, complains Mateusz (neither man would give a surname). People no longer admit that men and women often want to do different kinds of work.
In much of the developed world, the attitudes of young men and women are polarising. The Economist analysed polling data from 20 rich countries, using the European Social Survey, America’s General Social Survey and the Korean Social Survey. Two decades ago there was little difference between men and women aged 18-29 on a self-reported scale of 1-10 from very liberal to very conservative. But our analysis found that by 2020 the gap was 0.75 (see chart 1 ). For context, this is roughly twice the size of the gap in opinion between people with and without a degree in the same year.
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https://www.economist.com/international/2024/03/13/why-the-growing-gulf-between-young-men-and-women
Men and women have different experiences, so you would expect them to have different worldviews. Nonetheless, the growing gulf between young men and women in developed countries is striking. Polling data from 20 such countries shows that, whereas two decades ago there was little difference between the share of men and women aged 18-29 who described themselves as liberal rather than conservative, the gap has grown to 25 percentage points. Young men also seem more anti-feminist than older men, bucking the trend for each generation to be more liberal than its predecessor. Polls from 27 European countries found that men under 30 were more likely than those over 65 to agree that “advancing women’s and girls’ rights has gone too far because it threatens men’s and boys’ opportunities”. Similar results can be found in Britain, South Korea and China. Young women were likely to believe the opposite.
Unpicking what is going on is not simple. A good place to start is to note that young women are soaring ahead of their male peers academically. In the European Union fully 46% of them earn degrees, versus 35% of young men, a gap that has doubled since 2002. One consequence is that young women are more likely than men to spend their early adulthood in a cocoon of campus liberalism. Meanwhile, boys outnumber girls at the bottom end of the scholastic scale. Across rich countries, 28% of them fail to learn to read to a basic level. That is true of only 18% of girls.
Another big change is that, to varying degrees across the developed world, immense progress has been made in reducing the barriers to women having successful careers. College-educated men are still thriving, too—often as one half of a double-high-income heterosexual couple. Many men welcome these advances and argue for more. However, those among their less-educated brothers who are struggling in the workplace and the dating market are more likely to be resentful, and to blame women for their loss of relative status. And young women, by and large, are glad of past progress but are keenly aware that real threats and unfairness remain, from male violence to the difficulty of juggling careers and children. In short, most young women and worryingly large numbers of young men complain that society is biased against their own sex.
Young women tend to vote for parties of the liberal left. Angry young men, sometimes dismissed as toxically masculine by those parties, are being shrewdly wooed by politicians from the right and the far right. In South Korea their support helped an overtly anti-feminist president win power. In America polls are muddy but some pollsters think young men are souring on the Democrats. In Europe, where many countries offer a kaleidoscope of political choices, young male votes have helped fuel the rise of reactionary outfits such as the AfD in Germany, Confederation in Poland and Chega, which surged at Portugal’s election on March 10th.
Editor: Alice Weidel is currently serving as the co-chairwoman of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
Editor: The final paragraph of this Economist essay ‘Increasing the supply of educated and (one hopes) less angry men would be good for the women who must share the same world’
There is no easy solution to any of this. But clearly, more should be done to help boys lagging behind at school to do better. Some policies that might work without harming their female classmates include hiring more male teachers (who are exceptionally scarce at primary schools in rich countries), and allowing boys to start school a year later than girls, to reflect the fact that they mature later. Better vocational training could encourage young men to consider jobs they have traditionally shunned, from nursing to administration. Schooling boys better would not only help boys. Increasing the supply of educated and (one hopes) less angry men would be good for the women who must share the same world. ■
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/03/14/making-sense-of-the-gulf-between-young-men-and-women
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