I recently accepted a role as a monthly columnist at the Boston Globe, where I will contribute one opinion piece per month for their special Sunday e

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2024-04-29 18:30:05

I recently accepted a role as a monthly columnist at the Boston Globe, where I will contribute one opinion piece per month for their special Sunday edition. Here is my debut piece:

In 2021, 44 percent of young women in the United States identified as liberal compared with just 25 percent of young men — the biggest gender gap in 24 years of polling.

The [gender-equality] paradox is straightforward: Societies with higher levels of wealth, political equality, and women in the workforce show larger personal, social, and political differences between men and women. In other words, the wealthier and more egalitarian the country, the larger the gender differences.

The pattern exists not just for political ideology but also for things like academic preferences, physical aggression, self-esteem, frequency of crying, interest in casual sex, and personality traits such as extraversion. In all these categories, the differences have been largest in societies that have gone the furthest in attempting to treat women and men the same.

The gender-equality paradox might also help to explain why the gender gap in political orientation has grown among young people. One natural explanation is that young women are outpacing men in higher education, with men now making up just 40 percent of college students. Some evidence suggests that college tends to cultivate more liberal attitudes.