Conservative UK rag the Telegraph is worried about young women. In her article “Forget the manosphere. It’s angry Leftie women we need to worry about”, Rowan Pelling speaks of the concern she feels as a mother of boys and auntie to nieces:
“On both sides of the Atlantic, polling shows young women are far more likely to skew Left than their male counterparts. It’s fair to say this emerging female cohort seems to live in ceaseless dread and fury of fossil fuels, Elon Musk, toxic masculinity, TERFs and neo-Nazis.”
This dread and fury are, for Pelling, not a reasonable reaction to well-documented environmental destruction, a rise in authoritarianism and high rates of sexual assault, but the result of the “sewer-tide of social media and fake news” leading credulous young women astray. Pelling is concerned that the anger and misandry are so out of control that they are affecting—horror of horror—women’s desire to procreate, in contrast to her more “baby-positive” nephews. Pelling’s solution is a Love Island twist, where young women are put on an island with soldiers and marines—a stomach-churning proposition given the high rates of sexual assault in militaries—in the hope that they will realise that conservative, strong men are actually suitable love interests.
Inanity notwithstanding, Pelling is pointing to a real social trend; young women are more likely to be left wing than both their male and older counterparts. In Australia, 67 percent of young women described themselves as left leaning, compared to 50 percent of young men (still a very large proportion). While young men (18-28) are still more likely to vote for Labor than Liberal than their older counterparts, they are lagging behind Gen Z women. Young women are four times more likely to view Trump negatively than boys, with a 61-point disapproval rating for the female cohort.
In the US, Gallup polling shows that the number of 18 to 29-year-old women describing themselves as “liberal” had increased from 28 percent to 40 percent between the late 1990s and 2023. Young women are more likely to care about social issues such as the climate crisis, health care, feminism and anti-racism than men, according to polling in both Australia and the UK.
The right-wing media mock young women like Greta Thunberg and Grace Tame for standing up for these positions and not fawning before the powerful, and they dismiss those who admire them as brainwashed by fake news and social media algorithms. But it is a credit to Gen Z women that, in the face of an increasingly dire, violent and irrational world, they have chosen to respond rationally and with humanity.
The issues they are concerned about are pressing and real: the climate crisis is accepted and documented by the vast majority of environmental scientists and organisations like the United Nations. The gap between women and men in terms of pay and working conditions, housing, assets and violence and abuse is likewise a verifiable fact. It is the Murdoch press and right-wing ideologues who try, in the face of science, statistics and logic, to argue that climate change is not real and feminism has gone too far. It is the likes of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong who claim that genocide is actually self-defence and opposing it antisemitic bigotry. These are the real proponents of fake news aimed at misinforming young people, and they have an army of Trump-loving tech bros to help them.
Far from being “female malcontents” with “apocalyptic pessimism”, young women are simply choosing decency over capitalist propaganda. And politicians, columnists and the powerful hate it.
In the article ridiculed by Pelling, Emily Lawford for the UK New Statesman interviewed some of these young women who are at the forefront of left-wing and progressive politics. Many of these women are involved in activism, both online and in the real world, and feel despair at the state of the world.
One woman, Anna, spoke of the experience of attempting to get disability support radicalising her. “There is this real sense of panic and hopelessness”, she said about politics. “We have policies that aren’t looking after us. We have a government that doesn’t seem to give a shit if genocide happens.”
For many of the women interviewed, watching Israel’s genocide in Gaza, backed by the West, was a radicalising experience. Involved in the Gaza solidarity encampments, attending protests and organising fundraisers, these young women are part of a cohort globally who care about social issues, and who feel overwhelmingly negative about capitalism. Only 17 percent of young women responding to polling for the New Statesman had a positive view of capitalism. One interviewee, Phoebe O’Brien, described why she’s a revolutionary: “I want systemic change. I don’t want to exist within these same systems. I want to be an instrument of the revolution”.
Many of these young women don’t feel negative only about the system; they also feel negative towards young men. There’s a feeling that their male counterparts understand these social issues less and care less about women and changing the world.
This isn’t helped by the fact that at the same time young women are ridiculed for their political opinions, they are implored to “understand” the misogyny of young men struggling with their masculinity and who are drawn to rape-promoters like Andrew Tate. According to the Lowy institute, the political gender divide is due to young men “feeling scrutinised and sidelined, seeing few champions for their anxieties about status, purpose, and financial security”. The double standard is obvious: men’s ideas have legitimate roots, women’s reflect vacuous stupidity.
But it is worth recognising that the shift in politics among young people is trending generally in a leftwards direction. Not just young women, but young men too are turning against the system in greater numbers. According to research conducted by Intifar Sadiq Chowdhury into Australian young people’s political views, “The widening of the gender gap, then, is driven not by polarisation but by women moving leftward at a faster pace—or men doing so more slowly—rather than a true divergence”.
Gen Z women are showing us that there is hope. We owe it to them to give organisational expression to their political ideals and to stand against the patronising right-wing press that seeks to push them down.
