The growing divergence in political sensibilities between young men and young women has been well catalogued in recent years. The more straightforward and therefore more compelling narrative is that this has been driven by men, under the influence of the manosphere, moving to the right. But in these pages last week, my inimitable colleague Emily Lawford, supported by polling from Merlin Strategy, put forward a counter-narrative: that women under 30 are moving to the radical left on both politics and economics. They hold a far more negative view of their male peers than their male peers do of them, and are also more pessimistic about their own life chances. Gen Z women, the polling found, are less likely to say they feel “happy”, “ambitious”, “excited” and “fulfilled” than their male peers. How did we get here?
This is, in part, a story of how the online world reshapes the real one, as the boundary between the two becomes ever hazier. Social media has incentivised the promulgation of extreme minority views. Both the influencers who peddle them and the tech companies whose algorithms surface their content profit from pitting men and women against one another. Gen Z grew up in an era of freely available online pornography, much of which depicts horrific violence towards women. For many young women, watching such porn was their first experience of sex, warping their views of what is permissible, what is expected of them, what they are supposed to enjoy. As adults, they have encountered men who want to re-enact these violent acts, or else are so addicted to the airbrushed and inflated women on their phones that they can’t get it up for a real one. The effect is that, even if young women are not in fact surrounded by men who hate them, or with whom they are innately incompatible, they begin to believe that they are.
This is a crisis, then, of romance. But it is also a crisis of economics. The data suggests that young women in C2DE jobs (loosely speaking, manual workers, the unemployed or those on benefits) are more likely than their ABC1 (professional, managerial) peers to say that they believe if they work hard, they will succeed in life. Young ABC1 women are also less likely to say that the economy works well for people like them than young C2DE women, and hold a far more negative view of capitalism. This class divide works its way into how young women feel about the opposite sex, too: 36 per cent of Gen Z ABC1 women hold a positive view of men, compared to 61 per cent of C2DE women the same age.
These young women are not just – as your dad used to say – angry, they’re disappointed. They worked hard at school and at university, but their graduate jobs don’t pay them enough to have the sort of life they want. After tax, student loan repayments (despite which, the total they owe only continues to rise) and rent, they have little left to live on, never mind to save towards buying homes of their own. Unless their parents are able to contribute to a deposit, they have no choice but to continue to rent privately, investing their capital in their landlord’s future rather than their own. Both work and home feel insecure, leading to a feeling of generalised anxiety. These young people are less likely to say they believe that if they work hard they will succeed because they have worked hard, and they feel they have little to show for it.
This narrative goes some way to explaining why young people might be pessimistic about their futures, but it does not explain why young men and women experience this differently. Young men face similar economic hardships, yet according to the polling, 48 per cent believe the economy works well for people like them, compared to 34 per cent of young women. Gen Z women are net 21 points less likely than Gen Z men to say they are optimistic that they will earn more than their parents, and 19 points less likely to believe they will be able to buy the home they want.
These women, as our reporting showed, are moving to the left. But more anecdotally, I have observed a similar dissatisfaction with the economy among young women on the other side of the political spectrum. My social media algorithms feed me near constant content from women embracing the “trad wife” lifestyle and – separately but, I think, relatedly – from those who suggest their followers find themselves a “sugar daddy”. Each trades queasily on a different stereotype, in exchange for release from the capitalist, corporate hamster wheel.
Men, of course, are no more able to get off this wheel than women. But perhaps the difference in Gen Z women’s feelings towards it is again one of expectations. What the vagaries of girlboss feminism and its advocates promised the generation of women above them was the freedom to choose the life that they want, on their own terms. Swearing off romance of the traditional kind, they instead romanticised work. This was discovered to be a fallacy.
Today, women are trapped in work that does not pay. They have adapted to once-male workplaces, but men remain slow to adapt to domestic work in the home. If young women want to escape living with flatmates, it requires that they find a partner. They don’t know if they want children, but if they did, most wouldn’t be able to afford to stay at home with them even if they wanted to. Ultimately, they discover, a woman can choose to subjugate herself to a man, or to the man. And that feels like no choice at all.
[Further reading: How to laugh at the lanyard class]
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This article appears in the 22 Apr 2026 issue of the New Statesman, All alone
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