What Is America’s Gender War Actually About?
7 min read
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The United States is politically polarized along several lines, including race, geography, and education. Heading into a general election that will once again offer voters a choice between a Democratic woman and a Republican man, gender may seem like the clearest split of all. But surveys, polls, and political scientists are torn on how dramatically men and women are divided, or what their division actually means for American politics. The gender war is much weirder than it initially appears.
By several measures, men and women in America are indeed drifting apart. For most of the past 50 years, they held surprisingly similar views on abortion, for example. Then, in the past decade, the pro-choice position surged among women. In 1995, women were just 1 percentage point more likely to say they were pro-choice than men. Today women are 14 points more likely to say they’re pro-choice—the highest margin on record.
In 1999, women ages 18 to 29 were five percentage points more likely than men to say they were “very liberal.” In 2023, the gap expanded to 15 percentage points. While young women are clearly moving left, some evidence suggests that young men are drifting right. From 2017 to 2024, the share of men under 30 who said the U.S. has gone “too far” promoting gender equality more than doubled, according to data shared by Daniel Cox, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank. Gallup data show that young men are now leaning toward the Republican Party more than at any other point this century.
So far, this seems like a straightforward story: Men (especially young men) are racing right, while women (especially young women) are lurching left. Alas, it’s not so simple. Arguably, men and women aren’t rapidly diverging in their politics at all, as my colleague Rose Horowitch reported. At the ballot box, the gender gap is about the same as it’s long been. Men have for decades preferred Republican candidates, while women have for decades leaned Democratic. In a 2024 analysis of voter data, Catalist, a progressive firm that models election results, “found that the gender divide was roughly the same for all age groups in recent elections,” Horowitch wrote.
One suggested explanation for these apparent contradictions is that the most alarming surveys are showing us the future, and this November will establish a new high-water mark in gender polarization, with women breaking hard for Kamala Harris and men voting overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. Another possibility is that these surveys are a little misleading, and gender polarization has already peaked, in which case this is much ado about nothing.
A third possibility interests me the most. John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, says the gender gap is real; it’s just not what many people think it is. “The parties are more polarized by gender attitudes than by gender itself,” he told me.
If that sounds a bit academic, try a thought experiment to make it more concrete. Imagine that you are standing on the opposite side of a wall from 100 American voters you cannot see. Your job is to accurately guess how many of the folks on the other side of the wall are Republicans. You can only ask one of the following two questions: “Are you a man?” or “Do you think that men face meaningful discrimination in America today?” The first question is about gender. The second question is about gender attitudes, or how society treats men and women. According to Sides, the second question will lead to a much more accurate estimate of party affiliation than the first. That’s because the parties aren’t remotely united by gender, Sides says. After all, millions of women will vote for Trump this year. But the parties are sharply divided by their cultural attitudes toward gender roles and the experience of being a man or woman in America.
The fable above plays out in survey data, too. In the March 2024 Views of the Electorate Research (VOTER) Survey, 39 percent of men identified as Republican versus 33 percent of women. That’s a six-point gap. But when the VOTER Survey asked participants how society treats, or ought to treat, men and women, the gender gap exploded. Sixty-one percent of Democrats said women face “a lot” or “a great deal” of discrimination while only 19 percent of Republicans said so. In this case, the gender-attitude gap was more than six times larger than the more commonly discussed gender gap.
To Sides, the conclusion is obvious: The political parties are more divided by their views on gender than they are divided by gender itself. It’s not “men are from Mars, and women are from Venus.” It’s “Republican men and women are from Mars, and Democratic men and women are from Venus.”
America’s parties engage in highly gendered messaging, and the news media contributes to the sense that the parties stand in for masculine and feminine archetypes. “This is the boys vs. girls election,” Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei wrote in Axios before Harris became the Democrats’ presumptive nominee. In the article, they quote Trump advisers who played up the Republican National Convention as an opportunity to sell the GOP as “the testosterone party” that pits “Donald Trump’s chest-beating macho appeals vs. Joe Biden’s softer, reproductive-rights-dominated, all-gender inclusivity.”
Political language today is so coded by gender that it’s easy to identify blind quotes by party. If you hear a politician complain that the opposing party is dominated “by a bunch of childless cat ladies,” well, it’s obviously a Republican speaking. (That would be J. D. Vance in an interview a few years ago with Tucker Carlson.) If you hear a politician accuse the opposing party of becoming a “He-Man woman-hater’s club,” well, it’s obviously a Democrat talking. (In this case, the Democrat is Minnesota Governor Tim Walz describing the GOP presidential ticket and this month’s Republican National Convention.)
But there’s a difference between distinct gender rhetoric and a coherent vision of womanliness or manliness. For its part, the GOP plays host to several visions of masculinity, awkwardly mushed together. Trump is a thrice-married Lothario who combines the showmanship of a pro-wrestling heel with the wounded rage of a country-club rejectee. The result is a potent mix of cosmetic macho bluster and marrow-deep elite resentment. For the purpose of containing this multitude in a phrase, let’s call it “alpha-victim masculinity.”
Adding to the muddle, for the third straight election Trump is sharing the ticket with a devoutly Christian vice-presidential candidate whose vision of gender relations is distinctly conservative and traditional.
Whereas Trump flaunted his promiscuity, his vice president, Mike Pence, broadcasted his chastity. Whereas Trump’s alone time with women ultimately led to felony convictions, Pence refused to eat alone with any woman except his wife. Whereas Trump has divorced twice, his new running mate, Vance, has called into question the very institution of divorce. He said in 2021 that the ability to quickly end marriages is “one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace” and slammed the idea that we should make “it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear.”
If the GOP’s gender politics are fragmented by decorum and divorce, the glue tying the party together may be a nostalgia for social-dominance hierarchies and opposition to the cosmopolitan mores of the left. As the Cambridge University historian Gary Gerstle has written, the progressive movement originating with the New Left of the 1960s and ’70s has embraced a cultural politics that is “free of tradition, inheritance, and prescribed social roles” and that “rejected the notion that the patriarchal, heterosexual family should be celebrated.” The watchword of progressive gender politics is not tradition but liberation, a full break from the pull of history. Tradition, which conservatives see as a guardrail, progressives see as a straitjacket.
Women make up a majority of the electorate, outvoting men by millions of ballots each election. So it might be strategic for Democrats to adopt a political language and policy platform that appeals disproportionately to female voters. The problem, as Richard Reeves, the author of the book Of Boys and Men, has told me, is that men vote, too. The left has become more adept at shaming toxic masculinity than at showcasing a positive masculinity that is distinct from femininity. Progressive readers of the previous sentence might roll their eyes at the notion that it is the job of any left-wing political movement to coddle men’s feelings. But if a large shift rightward among young male voters helps Trump eke out a victory in November, Democrats will have little choice but to think up a new message to stop the young-male exodus.
“The Democratic Party appears to have made a conscious choice not to make young men a political priority,” Cox told me, just as “the GOP under Trump seems unconcerned about the ways it may be alienating young women.” If American politics in 2024 is a gender war, it is not yet a conflict between the genders. Let’s hope it never gets to that. But it is a conflict between the parties over the role of gender, the meaning of gender, the definition of gender. And that, frankly, is strange enough.
