For two years, a single chart has framed one of the most talked-about social claims of the decade: young men and young women are pulling apart politically, and Generation Z is splitting into two camps that barely understand each other. The chart, published by the Financial Times in January 2024, showed young women moving sharply to the left while young men stayed put or drifted right — in the United States, Britain, Germany, and South Korea alike.
The claim is not invented. But it is more fragile, more uneven, and more contested than the viral version suggests. What is measured, what is merely felt, what correlates, what actually causes, and what has been verified versus simply asserted — these are four different questions, and the honest answer to "is there a Gen Z gender divide?" depends on which one you are asking.
What the surveys actually measure
Start with the most-cited primary source in the US. Gallup, analyzing decades of its own polling, reported in February 2024 that the share of women aged 18 to 29 identifying as liberal rose from roughly 30 percent in 1999 to a peak of 44 percent in 2020, settling at 40 percent in 2023. Over the same span, young men barely moved: about 24 percent called themselves liberal in 1999, and about 25 percent did in 2023. The result is a 15-point gap in 2023 — the widest of any age group, and roughly five times what it was in 2000.
Read that carefully, because the framing matters. Gallup's own conclusion is that the gap widened mainly because young women moved left, not because young men moved right. The male line is close to flat. That is a very different story from "young men are radicalizing," even though both can produce the same widening gap on a chart.
Party identification tells a compatible story. Pew Research Center finds Gen Z women far more likely than Gen Z men to identify as Democrats — 41 percent versus 30 percent — with men more likely to call themselves Republican or independent. But Pew adds a caution that rarely survives the retelling: the overall partisan gender gap is roughly similar across age groups, not a phenomenon unique to the young.
The most extreme case, and the election that tested it
If any country supplies the vivid version of the divide, it is South Korea. In the 2022 presidential election, according to the joint exit poll run by broadcasters SBS, KBS, and MBC, 58.7 percent of men in their twenties voted for the conservative winner, Yoon Suk Yeol, while about 58 percent of women in their twenties voted for his liberal rival, Lee Jae-myung. Almost equal and opposite. Yoon won the country by 0.73 percentage points, the narrowest margin in Korean presidential history.
The United States offered its own test in 2024. Tufts University's CIRCLE, which specializes in youth-vote research, found that women aged 18 to 29 backed Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by 17 points (58 to 41), while young men backed Trump by 14 points (56 to 42). The rightward shift in party identification was strongest among young men — including a striking 20-point jump toward the Republican Party among young Black men compared with 2020, and 14 points among young Latino men.
Two cautions belong right next to those numbers. First, "Gen Z" is not one bloc: CIRCLE found that the youngest voters, 18 to 24, still favored Harris by about 10 points, while 25-to-29-year-olds tilted narrowly to Trump. Second, the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers, drawing on AP VoteCast, noted that the overall electorate's gender gap in 2024 was about nine to ten points — in line with recent cycles, not a historic rupture. The youth gap is real and larger than average; the national gap is ordinary.
Measured versus felt
This is where the first distinction — measured versus felt — earns its keep. The lived experience of the divide arrives through viral posts about a "war of the sexes," dating apps as battlegrounds, and the sense that young men and women can no longer talk politics. That felt reality is not nothing; a 2025 NBC News poll conducted with SurveyMonkey found that among adults 18 to 29, young men split 47–53 on approving of Trump while young women split 26–74, and that Gen Z women and men rank marriage and children differently in their stated priorities. Attitudes on gender roles diverge too, though less than the loudest framing implies: about three in four Gen Z women reject the idea that the country would be stronger if women held traditional roles — but so do 59 percent of Gen Z men.
The point is not that the feeling is wrong. It is that the feeling runs ahead of the numbers. The measured gaps are real; they are also smaller, and more dependent on how you ask, than the discourse assumes.
Verified versus asserted: where the data disagree
Here the story gets genuinely contested, and any responsible account has to say so. Not every dataset shows the same thing.
The clearest challenge comes from the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans. Using the Cooperative Election Study — a survey with more than 50,000 respondents in each even-year wave — analyst James Hawkins found in February 2024 that the ideology gap between young women and young men peaked at around 10 points in 2010 and had narrowed to about 7 points by 2022, with a trend line that is "essentially flat." In other words, one of the largest US survey instruments showed no clear divergence through 2022 — directly complicating the chart that launched the debate. (That analysis stops before the 2024 election, so it constrains claims about pre-2024 attitudes, not 2024 voting.)
A second challenge reframes what "moving right" even means. PRRI, in a May 2025 analysis by its chief executive Melissa Deckman, concluded that young men are "trending more Republican, but not necessarily more conservative." Their party identification has shifted — 26 percent of young men identified as Republican in 2024 versus 17 percent of young women — but their ideological self-label barely budged: conservative identification among young men sat at 31 percent in 2013 and 29 percent in 2024. Whatever moved, it was partisan attachment more than ideology, and it was concentrated among young white men rather than young men across the board.
A third challenge questions whether the divide is even a youth phenomenon. A study across 32 European countries, summarized by LSE researchers in April 2024, found that the gender gap in left–right self-placement is not reliably larger among the youngest cohort than among older ones, and is far smaller when measured by concrete issue positions than by ideological labels. Symbolic identity — the words people choose — diverges more than operational belief.
None of this proves the divide is fake. It shows that the size of the gap depends heavily on the instrument: liberal self-identification, party ID, issue attitudes, and vote choice are four different rulers, and they do not agree. The FT's viral "30-point" US figure and Gallup's "15-point" figure are not contradictions — they measure different things on different scales. Treating them as interchangeable is how a real but modest trend becomes an apocalyptic one.
Correlation versus cause
Suppose the divergence is real where it is measured. Why is it happening? Here the honest answer is: nobody has proven it, and the leading explanations are hypotheses attached to named researchers, not settled findings.
The Financial Times analysis, drawing on work by Alice Evans of King's College London, points to social media — the idea that young men and women increasingly inhabit separate online spaces with separate information diets. #MeToo, beginning in 2017, is frequently cited as an inflection point that raised the salience of gender issues for young women. Economic anxiety among young men, who in many countries trail young women in educational attainment, is another common candidate. In South Korea, participants and analysts point to mandatory military service for men, the largest gender wage gap in the developed world, and an organized anti-feminist current among some young men. One of the few studies to isolate a mechanism, by LSE's Felipe Carozzi and Andrés Gago, found that in Spain, center-right local governments implemented fewer gender-sensitive policies than left-leaning ones, plausibly nudging women leftward — but the authors present this as a partial channel, not the whole story.
Every item on that list is plausible. None has been established as the cause, and several are mutually reinforcing rather than competing. Correlation between, say, smartphone adoption and diverging attitudes is easy to draw; a clean causal claim is not.
What can be said honestly
Strip away the framing and a defensible summary remains. Young women in several wealthy democracies have moved measurably to the left over the past decade, and that shift is the best-documented part of the story. Young men have moved right in party terms in some places, most visibly in the 2024 US election and in South Korea, but their movement in ideological terms is weaker and, in some large datasets, hard to detect at all. The gap is real, it is largest among the youngest adults, and it varies enormously by country and by the tool used to measure it. Its causes are debated. Its permanence is unknown.
That is a more modest claim than "a new global gender divide is emerging," and a far more useful one. The divide is not a myth, and it is not the whole truth. It is a measured trend that grew louder than its own evidence — which is exactly why it is worth measuring carefully.