The boys are alright. The girls are all left.
A graph is making the rounds on X showing the growing political divide between men and women. Beyond the usual year-to-year fluctuations, men have stayed slightly, on average, to the right since 1999. Women, however, have trended wildly to the left. The gender gap in political viewpoint doubled between 1999 and 2023.
It’s common, and relatively easy, to blame our political woes on women, and when one is confronted with charts like the aforementioned, it seems downright obvious that female political involvement is our national problem.
“Repeal the 19th!” some would say in response to this trend. Yet repealing the 19th Amendment is a political goal as unpopular as it is pie-in-the-sky.
The reality is that women aren’t trending left because the right is toying with “trad” aesthetics and ideas, as some have indicated. Women have been shifting left-ward since the late 1990s.
Internet trends aren’t the reason for this shift either. The tiny subsection of the right that genuinely thinks women should not work a job isn’t causing women to vote for mass amnesty and abortion-on-demand out of spite.
The real cause is likely some combination of women’s natural liberal temperament, pop culture’s extraordinary success running PR for third-wave feminism, fewer women having babies (there is some indication that women with children are more conservative than their male counterparts), and a decline in marriage rates (i.e., a decline in women adopting their husband’s political opinions). Indeed, the growing gender divide in politics is an overlooked statistical phenomenon that deserves far more rigorous research.
Whatever reason there is for the leftward turn of young women, the solution cannot be for the right to become a more palatable version of the left. Extolling the virtues of domesticity, encouraging women to reject careerism, and adopting policies that incentivize women to have lots of children are still worthy goals for the right. They are also, sadly, not goals which much of the right is united behind.
The idea that the right is fundamentally traditional when it comes to gender and sex issues is as laughable as the idea that this phantom traditionalism is causing women to reject the right. The right is as feminist as the left was 15 years ago. Becoming more like the left is neither going to make women more right-wing, nor would it change anything if the ploy did become successful. It’s a political solution that doesn’t make any sense unless one’s goal is to merely elect officials with an “R” next to their name and pay no regard for their actual opinions on anything substantive.
Some solutions, such as focusing on “affordability messaging,” “kitchen table issues,” and “flexible work arrangements,” as researcher Gabriella Hoffman recently observed, promise much better success. It is unlikely that these issues alone would lead women to embrace conservatism, however. The reasons women are left-leaning don’t boil down to a lack of affordable groceries. Misplaced empathy for illegal alien criminals, an obsession with controlling her own capacity for bearing children (whether or not those children are already living), and the fact that nearly every influential female celebrity holds wildly left-wing viewpoints are more likely the real reasons the right is losing young women.
Addressing these root causes requires the right to grow more of a backbone, not lose what little they have in service of the feminist left’s political aims. The right should lean into the issues that make young men a more dependable voting bloc for them. They should also lean into the issues that cause some segments of women to continue voting for them, such as married evangelical white women. Drifting to the left will only alienate the voters they do have and do nothing to win the voters they don’t have.
Sarah Wilder is a writer and commentator on culture and the family. Formerly a reporter at the Daily Caller, her work has been published in Chronicles Magazine, The Federalist, and The American Mind.
This culture article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal, a project of 1819 News. To comment on this article, please email [email protected]. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News.
