[Music] Welcome to today's episode of FAPS Talks, the official podcast of the Foundation for European Progressive Studies. I'm your host, Matteo Dressler. I'm a policy analyst here at FAPS for the topics of democracy, participation and young people. And I'll be your host today. Today we want to talk about a topic which has made quite a few headlines and all of the major
outlets, English-speaking outlets, news outlets. These headlines read like "What's behind the global political divide between young men and women that has recently, for example, been published in The Guardian just after the US elections, but also the Financial Times has covered this subject and others have too." And all of these articles look into the question or into the phenomena of young women, allegedly increasingly being more progressive in their political attitudes and also voting in
this way. And on the flip side of that, young men arguably not following that trend of becoming more progressive and in some of the extreme forms even voting for far-right parties, extreme right parties forming some of their core support base. So the question that we try to answer today, what is it about that divide? And while this is of course media articles, we also must acknowledge that when we go to academia that perhaps we don't have all the full answers to this question, to
this phenomena yet. But with us today I have Dr. Gevgen Off, who is a postdoctoral researcher in comparative politics at Leuvena University of Lüneburg and she will help us explore this topic. Hello Gevgen. Hi. She's recently completed her PhD in political science at Gosdenberg University and specializes in political behavior, gender and politics, and her PhD dissertation, which came out about one and a half years ago, dealt with the topic of
backlash against feminism and its link to radical right support. And she has published in a lot of acclaimed journals and her research has also piqued the interest of aforementioned outlets. She has been kind of quoted in some of the articles that I referred to earlier. She's also currently working on a three-year research project funded by the Swedish Research Council, where she explores who feels threatened by women's empowerment and she's also working on a book
on a similar topic. So we are thrilled to have Gevgen with us to explore these questions. And before actually delving into the question of this divide of political attitudes between young men and women, I want to take a small step back. I want to ask you Gevgen to tell us a little bit more about what we generally know about the issue of different political opinions between men and women over the last decades. If you have seen any changes, if this has been a very polarizing kind
of what in political science you call often cleavages. So something really polarizing that parties have explored, for example, like religion back in the days, or if there is actually no real big divide. And then also once we have kind of explored these bigger trends, perhaps talk a bit about the differences in what we know about the differences in political attitudes between young men and women. And if we talk about young men and young women, we often talk about those under
30 often also labeled as generations that. Yes, thanks for having me here and thanks for the kind introduction. So as regards to the gender gap in voting or political attitudes or also political ideology, we know that there are decades long trends. So I mean, there are new trends today, but there are also decades long trends that we have been observing as political scientists and sociologists. And so for instance, in the 50s and 60s, women were still voting more towards the
center right, often explained by ideology and religiosity. And then as women were empowered on the labor market, and as Western societies, especially secular secularized, women shifted more towards the left wing, right? And since the 90s, more or less depends on the country, women are more likely to vote for the left wing than than men. But actually, this wasn't always the case, right? So nowadays, women more likely vote for the left ring, men more likely vote for
the right wing. And it's often explained by women's interest as, for instance, main caretakers, they are more likely to rely on welfare services. Also women are more likely to work in the public sector. And the left wing is usually the political side that wants to strengthen the public sector. So it's often explained by women's own interests as defined by by roles that are quite specific to women in terms of child rearing, first of all, and then often still caretaking,
but also as public sector officials, for example. And then if we look at the radical rights, at the moment we see a gender gap in radical right voting, actually, this was, I think, even still stronger a few years ago. But as these parties are growing, the radical right gender gap is not necessarily persisting in all countries. In France, for instance, we've seen that it closed. But the radical right gender gap is is interesting because it's usually explained by
different factors. So for instance, a lot of studies don't find that men and women are particularly different in terms of their immigration attitudes. They think similarly about immigration, usually. But still men are more likely to vote for the radical right, right? And so scholars are trying to find out why this is the case. Some people argue it's because of men's versus women's personality traits. Women are less risk taking, for instance, so they might
maybe not vote for a radical party, or women are more sensitive to social stigma. And if a radical right party is socially stigmatized in society, women might be more sensitive to this and therefore not right vote for the party. So there are different explanations out there explaining why these gender gaps persist or also why they closed. So for instance, in France, this gender gap, it has closed.
It might open again, we don't know that. But it's often argued that this is because of Marine Le Pen, who explicitly explicitly says she represents women's interests in certain ways. Yeah. And so if there is this kind of representation, we might see that these gender gap closed, at least among some, especially white men and women. Great. That's already interesting to also have the broader trends over the last decades that
we've seen some changes. And also that perhaps the research or what we observe is not always that clear in terms of that there's a clear divide between men and women. But some countries are like this, then they change back again, even in the last last years. Now, indeed, leaving from this more general kind of look onto gender divide, what do we know specifically about differences in attitudes between young men and young women? What does the research tell us? What do we know
from opinion research on how the differences matter there? That would be something that that would be very interesting to figure out, especially against this background, that there's always this, especially in media, this argument that young men are kind of explaining all the success of extremist right parties. I'm kind of polarizing this a little bit.
But yeah, to actually know what's really going on, what are the differences and perhaps also on what questions are there differences between young men and women and on what questions, when it comes to political issues, are there perhaps no differences as well? Yes. So first of all, I want to say that usually research still finds that all young people, men and women, are more progressive in their attitudes
than older people. And this is often explained by young people growing up in the time where societies are more liberal, right? So if you think about people who grew up, I don't know, maybe in the 50s or 60s, of course, times were different. And the youth and youth is a very formative time period. People build their values and attitudes throughout their youth and maybe
young adulthood. And so of course, these formative years affect how people think later on too. And then we see a generational replacement in a way where young people tend to be more progressive on average than older people. And this is quite a consistent finding. And I don't want to contradict this finding on a whole. I think this is important to still point out young people are generally
more progressive than older people. But so if we expect a trend where young men and women are both more progressive than older men and women, on some indicators, we don't seem to see this at the moment. This is quite new as a phenomenon. I think the first data that captures this might come from 2020, I'm not sure exactly, but it's quite a recent phenomenon. And so we are still trying to
figure out what exactly is going on because you need data to conduct this kind of analysis. And for instance, so if you have this data, you need to have a very large sample because you're looking into very specific subgroups, right? You want to look at not only men and women, but also just young men and women and then the ones who are interested in the far right. And if you count and you only have maybe a thousand or 2,000 people per country, even if the sample is representative,
you end up with a very small number of people who fall into these groups. And then it's hard to make statistical predictions based on the small group. So what you want is ideally real voting data. That would be great. We're just very large country samples, right? And we have some of those. But then depending on the questions, you also find different trends, right? So for instance, if you look at far right voting, I just ran a few analysis this week to prepare. And you see
that there is a gender gap in far right voting in a few countries. But like, I mean, I checked different European countries. And I, in my analysis, I found one in Finland, Italy, Poland, Romania, and Sweden, but not in the rest of the European Union countries where the samples were large enough. So in some of the Eastern European countries, I didn't have enough data to check this. And this is a question where people are asked if elections would happen today, who would you vote
for? And then I checked if they vote for a foreign party. But for instance, I have Swedish data from the exit polls, which is when people are asked right after casting their vote, right? So in 2022, they had their elections, they came out of the election booth, and they were asked, who did you vote for? And here I also find this trend. And we have 10,000 people who answered this question. So
that allows us to run a lot of analysis. I find the same trend, but the trend is a bit different, because in the Swedish data, I find that young men are actually saying that they are much more right wing than also the men of the older generations. Whereas in the other analysis I ran on the European data, it's the young women who are much more left wing than the older generations, but the young men are necessarily much more right wing than the older generations.
Right? So it really depends when you ask the question and how you ask the question. And this is just the question about voting. But you can also ask about their left-right ideology. And here sometimes you find similar trends. And then if you look at specific indicators, I checked for anti-immigration attitudes, because you would think that that is the most important predictor of far-right voting. And there are actually very few countries where you see this gap in immigration
attitudes. I think I found four countries. And I think it was Finland, Denmark, Sweden, and Spain. So interesting that it's the Scandinavian countries where you would see this, in this data set at least. But out of all the European countries, it's quite a small number of countries, right? Or European Union countries. So here we still see most often that young men are more progressive than older men. And young women are also more progressive than older women. And the gender gap isn't that
large on the immigration indicator. So yeah, it really depends on what kind of questions you ask. And then with my co-authors, we mostly look at different kinds of gender equality attitudes. So are you in favor of gender equality measures, of feminist proposals, these kind of questions? And we find, here we find some quite persistent youth gender gaps, but it's also again on specific questions. So if you ask them, are you in favor of gender equality, you don't find it. If you ask
them, are you in favor of homosexuality or abortion rights, you don't find it. Young men are in favor of these things on average. So this is not where you see the youth gender gaps emerging. But if you ask them, whether they think that women's discrimination is no longer a problem in their country, then young men are the ones to say, or who are most likely to say in many countries, yes, they believe that women's discrimination is no longer a problem. Whereas young women are the
least likely ones to say this. So it's not necessarily a strong radical anti-feminist statement, right? It's just saying, I believe there is no women's discrimination in my country. And here you see the divergence, because young women are the ones still saying, no, there is women's discrimination, we need to do something. Young men are the ones saying, well, no, I don't think there's still discrimination. And it's quite, I mean, I think in a way you could
explain it, because young women nowadays are more highly educated than men on average. And it has been like that for maybe about 15 years, more or less. And if you enter the entry level job market, right, you compete basically based on your education. And a lot of the discrimination factors in today's labor markets, at least in Western European countries, do not really matter yet, right? We know that if you compete for leading positions, usually you have a glass
sealing effect where women are more discriminated than men. But this is not happening if you compete for your first job, right? You're not competing for leading positions. We also know that if you have children, often for women, this results in a motherhood penalty on the labor market, but for men it doesn't. But again, this doesn't really concern people who enter the labor market for the first time, or for most people at least, this doesn't play a role then. So it is actually a
time when people compete on rather equal grounds. Young men and women compete on rather equal grounds when they look for their first jobs. And so this is the moment where young men feel like there's no more women's discrimination. Yeah, that's very interesting what you say.
on the one hand that empirically from what we know we can talk about the gender gap in the younger generation for some countries but because if I understand you right mostly because of a lack of data we cannot really say for the whole of Europe it's not like it's not there necessary for other countries we just don't know and we'll hopefully find out out more in the in the future and then one of the kind of most intuitive factors which might explain such difference in
political attitudes and also far-right voting like sentiments, opinions towards migration there is actually not that much difference from those countries where we know about them between young men and young women but rather we are talking about differences or kind of competition in the labor market for young people entering the labor market and competing for jobs and perhaps also an idea or resentment towards that by young men who for example for their role
models their parents whatever from their grandparents they don't know this kind of competition necessarily because this is a recent trend that young women are highly educated partly even more
highly educated than young men and that the resentment kind of stems from that. I think what is also interesting to know beyond kind of just what explains the difference or where the differences specific differences are what one can perhaps actually do about that also of course that's as a progressive thing saying if we think about policy responses if we know now or well we have some some evidence to suggest that it is a lot about the labor market so maybe there are things
one can do there to also with policies to address this resentment among some young men we also not always talking about everyone that's very clear so to perhaps talk a bit more about what maybe policy wise especially from a progressive standpoint one can do kind of to of course continue to advance gender equality continue to advance feminism continue to also attack and call out sexism but doing it perhaps in a smart way with policies that also tries to take some of these
young men which might feel some resentments because of what you just explained along so to just give
some examples of yeah what one as a progressive policymaker maybe can also think about. Yes so we find that the young men who are most likely to hold a bit more conservative attitudes on these questions are lower educated they are they have lower income on average and they live in areas where unemployment has been going up they also live in areas where the difference between young women and men in terms of education is larger so women are outperforming young men to a greater
extent and they also tend to distrust political or government institutions to a greater extent so in this case I think there's this classical or typical left behind argument in the literature that often explains radical right voting it tends to be people who lose or who have lost economically who live in regions that are economically not as strong for instance and so on but here this might apply to young men too right so these are people who are more insecure economically.
There are even some studies who find that this gender education gap where women are outperforming men leads to a decline in in dating in partnering where the ones again who are lower educated are less likely to find a partner so there are yeah there are ways to to spot this insecurity and in quite tangible and partly objective ways that might we might be able to address but then there will always be people who are lower educated or have lower income than others right so I
I wonder how much you can actually address these objective factors but rather provide them with more of a subjective sense of security and that is of course more tricky so how do you make these people trust the institutions how do you make these people feel economically secure how do you make them trust that they will be fine on the labor market and probably also on the dating market right how do you how do you do that as a policy maker I think that is trickier but that is probably
what needs to happen and then in the other way I I tend to wonder so does this mean or does do our findings mean that these people are actually not aware of women's discrimination because it seems like in some of them at least might believe that there is no problem with women's discrimination in contemporary societies and then of course maybe awareness campaigns can work but you need to conduct an awareness campaign in a way that makes them believe that this is
actually happening and not in a way that makes them feel left behind or provoked or yeah as if they didn't matter for instance but I mean last week was was it this week this week was the international day against violence against women or for violence against women right and of course we see these reports on on all this stuff that is happening and I wonder how people cannot see it right this is a whole different dimension of discrimination if we don't talk about labor
market discrimination there is a whole different dimension out there that is all about violence that is still very much happening in in all countries in Europe and yeah so sometimes I wonder if these awareness campaigns can help but then you don't want to provoke and make them feel even more like they don't matter or they're the bad ones right right so so I suppose what you're saying is on the one hand of course there is policies which are very classical ones that can try to address
some of the structure factors that you mentioned such as a lack of employment opportunities so to both deliver them to young people and here we probably talk which is always a core theme of course not about only providing a job but also a decent job where you maybe feel at home where you feel some connections etc with a decent salary and also perhaps what you mentioned lower education investing in education or ensure also that those which perhaps have a lower education also can
have access to these decent decent jobs on the other hand you're also saying that next to this we need campaigns of course for awareness raising for some of the problems that still persist both on the labor market although one might argue maybe then young men don't see it as much in their personal life because as you explained the differences are smaller to begin with when you enter the labor markets then later but also on issues like that are very still a very huge challenge
of course like the violence against women that is still very persistent also in many western democracies to that point I'm wondering also from if you're aware of some research on political communication on not to draw out full campaigns but how to address some of these topics in exactly a way that again they don't compromise on advancing gender equality feminism but still being aware that you're trying to perhaps address a segment of the the population young men which perhaps have
this kind of feeling of left behind or a word that's often used as well as kind of this backlash like young women have it too good so I don't have it so bad and then you create resentment and that might yeah make you decide on a different political party so I guess my point is how to kind of address them without compromising on your core values but in a smart way to talk to them what are the things are you then going to talk about the policies because we all know politics is not
all about policies I mean these are important but you also kind of have to embed them in some type of message narrative which maybe takes people emotionally long I'm you don't you of course not a political consultant but there is research probably also on political communication on what can be effective to to address some of these these young men that feel that way while also being aware that you will never address all of them I guess that can never be the goal and you will
always not reach some but there's certainly also a big group where you might have some potential so on some some advice some ideas on how to do it perhaps as well yeah actually we tried on my co-authors we tried an experiment where we presented people with the same policy but framed in different ways and we wanted to measure whether their support then differs right and as that yeah we especially tried to frame the goal of the policy of either benefiting women or girls or
benefiting everyone in society and we also tried to frame the goal of the policy as either benefiting people in the labor market so there's some you know some competition element there maybe or benefiting people in terms of being free to do and live as they want you know a bit of a softer framing but actually we don't find any effects in that direction so it seems like you cannot change people's opinion about a certain policy at least in our experiment I don't entirely
believe that it's impossible but we don't find these effects so in our case the way that we explain this is that probably people have strong opinions about these policies that we proposed so one was a gender quota and one was school reforms for more gender quality and teaching people seem to have these opinions quite clearly formed and by framing it one way or the other you don't really change the way that they think about it this is our finding so far I'm not aware yet of of so many
other papers on this but yeah I I cannot really give you an answer no no no I think also as the progressive movement broadly talking and also policymakers politicians that feel close to it of course they they don't all all need to rely only also on academic evidence but they also have to experiment and try themselves of how to do this of course and then that could also be then first attested what has worked what hasn't worked in terms of convincing yeah first of all bringing
into play the policies that that might address some of these things but also talking about them in a way that might kind of bring some people back to yeah change their attitudes and also in the most extreme cases maybe prevent them from from voting for forces that are clearly not democratic yes I think this almost brings us already to the end because we've already reached the 25 a minute mark and what I always like to do towards the end because this is of course a very short
format is to to ask our guests as well about perhaps three inspiring publications movies podcast whatever the format might be for our audience to learn more about these subjects because yes we could only touch about these issues very shortly and before doing that perhaps also in some shameless self-promotion also to mention that febs also does a lot of research on what concerns young people their hopes their concerns how they can also be talked to for example through social media what
works what doesn't work which is a publication that will bring out about two weeks and on along the same lines we also have a lot of good research on broader questions on gender policy and especially also targeted towards the European Union so if you're interested in these subjects I strongly advise you check out our website but Gevjon three more yeah publications films movies that you think could perhaps interest our audience to kind of learn more about the topic yeah I have two I'm
sorry about that but I think one one nice thing is Ellis Evans blog so Ellis Evans is a scholar who's writing a book called the great gender divergence and she's traveling the world doing a lot of fieldwork like really being in places all over the world trying to understand gender dynamics and that will probably result in a very interesting book the book is not yet published but she writes a blog about this whole research process and her thoughts and I think what is
really interesting about this blog is that she she thinks out of the box she thinks across very different disciplines of the social sciences and also she provides a lot of food for thought that is not always backed by evidence but always very intriguing in terms of the the line of thought that she has so I think this blog is very inspiring if you want to get new ideas on how to think about gender equality and different trends and gender equality across the world as well
so that's the great gender divergence Ellis Evans and then for stuff backed by data or I mean I don't want to say that isn't backed by data but some very rigorous analysis that are always backed by data and very rigorous way I would look at the analysis by John Byrne Moirduck at the Financial Times so he did an article especially on on this divergence between young men and women that was published in
January 2024 but he has done more on this topic that received a bit less attention there is a piece and young women starting to leave men behind that he published in September 2024 and he shows he shows trends basically and data and lets the data speak for itself very often on these topics and so that's always great to look at as well yes and one one thing to add perhaps on on his work is also that it's very nice to look at they do a great great job on
visualizing some of these trends some of these emerging differences I think that that's it for today thank you so much Geffen for for being with us today it's been a pleasure and I hope our audience found the discussion and the insight as as engaging as I did and we hope you will tune in again for future episodes of the FAPTS Talks what's left to say stay informed and stay progressive and goodbye thanks for having me