Good morning and happy Friday! This week in Boston it snowed and we had a wind storm, so I'm feeling very jealous of any of you who live further south than I. Let's get into it: Over the past three months, the journalism-opinion industrial complex has erupted in another round of hand wringing over a new — or newly spotlighted — social phenomenon: young women and men are growing increasingly further apart in their political beliefs. The discussion was largely spurred by a Financial Times data analysis — and was met with varying degrees of panic over the future of marriage and an avalanche of “Men Are From Venus, Women Are From Mars” puns. The narrative also met some backlash, mainly from pundits asserting that it is too soon to draw sweeping conclusions about what this political rift means — and that more data is needed to understand the cause (the Financial Times piece largely attributes it to the #MeToo movement.) But it’s clear that a rift is widening in the U.S. and several other wealthy countries. According to Gallup data, from 1999 to 2013, about three in 10 American women aged 18 to 29 consistently identified as liberal. In 2023, that number was 40 percent, while just a quarter of men in that age group identified as liberal in 2023. In the Financial Times piece, author John Burn-Murdoch cites Alice Evans, a visiting fellow at Stanford University, whose research has shaped the discussion around the issue. Evans has traveled around the U.S. — and the world — talking to young women about their ideologies, and she spoke with Women Rule this week about what she believes to be the root causes behind the growing divide. Here’s our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity. GARDNER: You’ve written that the gender divide is usually suppressed by societies that are close-knit and religious. Do you think that the countries where we’re seeing these ideological divides emerge are losing some of those attributes? EVANS: Sure. America has become much more secular, people are not going to churches or mosques so much. If you are in Pakistan, you are socially expected to marry and you are highly policed. For example, a woman may be uncomfortable to even leave her house alone, or to express dissent. Feminists organized the Aurat March in Pakistan, and that means huge backlash. There are very high costs to speaking out and expressing differences. GARDNER: You also wrote that social media and “echo chambers” are another reason for the rift. How so? EVANS: People self-select into the social media they want to consume. So women may be already interested in equality bias, racial justice, etc, then the social media companies want to keep users hooked, so they feed them information that caters to their preferences. So you are surrounded by what's called a filter bubble, where you're hearing stories that confirm your priors. Instead of considering the ways that you might be wrong, you're constantly hearing: ‘Yes, yes, yes. I agree with you.’ On top of that, we need to also recognize that women tend to be what we call more mimetic, more attuned to what their friends are doing. So when something happens among your peers, you're more likely to follow suit. And you're also seeing the polarizing, hostile content from the other side. The most extremist people tend to be the loudest, and then those polarizing statements are used by the opposition to portray the entire other half of America. GARDNER: You wrote that, in your view, part of the ideological change is spurred by a resentment, specifically on the part of men, often around collegiate or professional success. Can you expand on that? EVANS: Let me give you an example from a young Chinese immigrant that I met at a tech firm here in the Bay Area. She is a very skilled computer scientist and programmer, and other men who are also very skilled, in a class, will want to sit with her and learn with her. But it will be the guys at the back of the class who are more insecure and feel threatened by her doing well, and they'll be more likely to express animosity. So the hostility will vary by whether the guy is clever and sees her as an ally, or whether he's like an insecure guy not doing so well. It can also vary by organization. So for example, some tech firms are incredibly competitive, like Amazon, which will hire lots of workers but then let them go. So if you're constantly fearing for your job, then you might be more hostile to women and perceive them as threats. A third factor could be market security. Last year was a really bad year for tech, and there was a big conference for women in tech, but lots of men went. … So they wanted to barge women out of the way. So it's male insecurity every single time, but it's mediated by how competent the guy is, how competitive the firm is, and how competitive the market is. And we see those same dynamics happening in society at large. GARDNER: Do you think the declining birthrate in the US has anything to do with the political and ideological divide? EVANS: I think it’s important to recognise that because you're not shamed and socially pressured into having children, you can do your own thing. And there are so many fun exciting things in the world to do. If you want you can become a prominent economist and spend all your life writing economics papers, or you can spend your time playing video games, or you can go traveling. Last year I spent time in San Francisco, Chicago, New Haven, California and Alabama interviewing young women. One woman in Montgomery said to me: ‘I want to live my life.’ And it's not just women, it’s men and women. You've got so many possibilities to explore, and having children is a very intensive project, so some don’t necessarily want to invest in it. So you’ve got this cultural freedom to do whatever you want. On top of that, parental involvement is now very high. So in order to get your children to the top universities, you need to invest a lot. For example, in Hong Kong, I interviewed one woman and she said I would not have another child because it's so competitive to get your child into a kindergarten. They have to submit a video of their child socializing nicely to get into the good kindergarten. It's the intensive competition, and also the and also the cultural liberalization.
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