Boys are not turning rightward, and girls are not going woke

At least not in most of Europe

In early 2024, the Financial Times published an article showing that young men and young women across several developed countries are diverging in their political ideology. Young women are moving left, young men are moving right, and the gap is growing. The piece was widely shared and discussed, and the finding was picked up by many other outlets. It also influenced me; so much so that in my 2024 study on the political ideology of youth in Slovenia, where I found clear evidence for the gap, I approvingly cited the article.

Now, a new study in the European Sociological Review by Richard Nennstiel and Ansgar Hudde provides a good opportunity to check how well this narrative holds up from a more systematic perspective (you might also want to look at a similar 2020 study). The researchers analyzed Eurobarometer survey data covering over 466,000 young adults aged 20–29 across 32 European countries, spanning the years 1990 to 2023. This is a large dataset that allows us to see what's actually happening across the continent, rather than relying on a handful of countries.

The short answer is that the picture is far more heterogeneous than the popular narrative suggests. In many European countries, there is no meaningful gender gap in political ideology among the young. In others, there is a gap, but it has been stable for decades. In a smaller subset, the gap is indeed widening - but even here, the pattern doesn't always match the simplistic story.

Figure from Nennstiel and Hudde (2025).

The majority: either no gap or a stable one

As you can see in the figure above, there’s a whole bunch of countries where there’s simply no ideological gender gap to begin with. In 14 of the 32 countries studied, young men and young women are ideologically almost equally placed today.

In 7 additional countries, there is what researchers call a modern gender gap (in contrast to the traditional gap, which saw women being more right-wing), meaning women lean somewhat more to the left than men. But this gap has remained roughly stable since the 1990s.

In the Netherlands and Norway, the gap is moderate in size. In the other five countries, it's small. But to my mind, the key point is that this isn't a recent development. Young women in these countries have been somewhat more left-leaning than young men for over 30 years. Whatever is causing this pattern, it's not a new phenomenon driven by recent cultural or political changes.

Here’s another, more detailed figure from the paper that clearly shows no worrying growing gap in most of the European countries under consideration. (Also, what the hell is going on with Bulgaria?)

Figure from Nennstiel and Hudde (2025).

The gap exists and is widening in some places

In a minority of cases (11 countries out of 32), the researchers do observe a modern gender gap that has grown over recent decades. But even within this group, there's important variation in how the gap is widening.

In 6 of these 11 countries (Denmark, Finland, France, Lithuania, Slovenia, and Sweden) the pattern matches the popular narrative. That is, young men have been moving somewhat to the right while young women have been moving to the left. In the other 5 countries (Estonia, Greece, Luxembourg, Spain, and the United Kingdom), something different is happening. Men are either stable in their ideological self-placement or are also moving to the left, but women are moving to the left faster. So the gap is widening not because men are becoming more conservative, but because women are becoming more progressive at a quicker pace.

The relationship with gender equality

The most interesting finding from the study I’d like to mention and briefly discuss in conclusion is that modern gender gaps tend to be larger in countries with greater gender equality. This might seem counterintuitive at first blush, but it goes together with patterns observed in other domains. For instance, as you probably know, there’s a literature on the “gender equality paradox,” which sometimes (!) finds that more gender-equal countries sometimes show larger gender differences in things like STEM career choices or personality traits.

The authors offer several possible explanations for why this might be happening specifically with political ideology.

One possibility draws on the Tocqueville paradox. The paradox states that as inequalities decrease, sensitivity to remaining disparities can actually increase. In more gender-equal societies, the topic of gender equality is more prominent in public discourse, which means the remaining gaps are more notable, and people may align their broader political identity more closely with their views on gender issues.

Another obvious possibility is that advances in gender equality trigger different reactions in men and women. Some women may feel that progress has been too slow and become more supportive of left-wing parties that emphasize further change. Some men may feel that their status is threatened by changes to traditional gender dynamics, or may simply be less enthusiastic about further equality-focused policies. In either case, you can get divergence between the genders.

A third possibility is simply that in societies where gender equality is more advanced, sociocultural issues (including gender-related issues) have become more central to what it means to be left- or right-wing in the first place. This one also seems very intuitively likely to me. And if the left-right dimension really is increasingly about cultural values (instead of economics), and if men and women differ somewhat in their cultural values, then the gender gap in left-right self-placement would widen even if underlying attitudes haven’t changed much.

I’m not really sure what’s going on here, but the correlation between national gender equality and the size of the political gender gap is a consistent and intriguing finding. In any case, don’t fall for the juicy narrative! That’s the really important bit.