A great gender divergence is unfolding across the West (and much of the non-West). Young men are increasingly voting for Right-wing parties, while young women are increasingly supporting Left-wing parties. In an article for the FT last year, John Burn-Murdoch analysed data from four major Western countries, and produced the chart below.
Since the early 2010s, young women in all four countries have become more likely to identify as Left-wing or liberal. And in three out of four, young men have become more likely to identify as Right-wing or conservative. (Burn-Murdoch just posted an updated chart for Germany.) In the fourth country, Britain, both men and women have become more likely to identify liberal. However, the increase has been much larger among women, who are now almost 40 points more likely to do so than they were in 2010.
What explains this gender divergence? One possibility is that young men have become more Right-wing across the board, relative to women – more opposed to feminism, more opposed to socialism, more opposed to immigration etc. Another possibility is that they’ve moved Right specifically on issues surrounding gender, perhaps due to the MeToo movement and the backlash it provoked. Which is it?
A new Norwegian study finds that it’s the latter – at least in Norway.
Ruben Mathisen analysed data from the Norwegian School Elections Survey. The Norwegian School Elections are mock elections held in the same years as the country’s national and local elections, where high school students cast secret ballots for one of the national parties. The Norwegian School Elections Survey is a survey carried out in each school after the mock elections. Happily for social scientists like Mathisen, it has a very large sample size (on the order of 130,000) since all high school students are invited to participate.
The author began by checking whether the gender divergence exists in Norway too. He found that it does.
Since the early 2000s, the gender gap in Left-Right voting among teenagers has risen by more than 20 points: Norwegian boys are now 45 points more likely to back Right-wing parties than are Norwegian girls. Interestingly, there has been no discernible divergence among adults during this period. Rather, the divergence is heavily concentrated among teenagers.
Since the survey asks teenagers not only how they ‘voted’ (in the mock elections) but also for their views on major social issues, Mathisen was able to examine which issues showed the largest gender divergence.
He found that the only major issue where boys’ and girls’ views have diverged is gender equality. Specifically, boys have become much more likely to say that “gender equality has gone too far”. Their views on immigration and the economy, however, remain unchanged. The author carried out a statistical decomposition, and was able to attribute half the gender divergence in Left-Right voting to shifting attitudes to gender equality.
An important caveat is that these findings apply to Norway but not necessarily elsewhere. In other places, the gender divergence may extend well beyond the issue of gender equality.
I should state that I don’t know much about Norwegian politics or society. But I assume it’s gone through the same Great Awokening with respect to gender as the Angloshpere, which would mean: dubious allegations of sexual assault, trumped up claims of ‘sexism’ and incessant complaints about ‘equal representation’ and the ‘gender pay gap’. If that is indeed the case, I don’t think it’s a great mystery why Norwegian boys are moving Right.
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