Are Young Men Really Becoming More Sexist?
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It’s conventional wisdom that young people will be more progressive than their forebears. But although young people can often be counted upon to be more comfortable with risk and radicalism, that doesn’t mean they will always express that through left-leaning politics.
Young men may have helped hand President-Elect Donald Trump his victory, fueling the narrative about a growing gender gap among young voters. But this is not just an American trend. In South Korea, young men have been radicalized against feminism, opening up a large gender gap; in Poland, gender emerged “as a significant factor … with young men showing a strong preference” for the far-right political alliance; and in Belgium, the anti-immigrant and separatist Vlaams Belang party received significantly more support from young men than young women.
Could the Gen Z political gender gap be an international phenomenon?
Today’s episode of Good on Paper is with Dr. Alice Evans, a senior lecturer at Kings College London who is writing a book on the root causes of gender inequality across the world. Originally published in June, this episode helps untangle some of the reasons young men may be feeling disaffected and reacting differently than young women to macroeconomic and political trends.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Jerusalem Demsas: Following the election, there have been many many arguments made about the growing gender gap between young men and young women. That women are more likely to vote for Democrats has been a consistent feature of my entire life, but this wasn’t always the case.
In the year 2000, the political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris released a paper establishing “gender differences in electoral behavior.” Basically, they showed that women had become a liberal force in small-d democratic politics.
That was a notable finding, because in the postwar era, women were, on average, seen as a more conservative electoral factor. Norris and Inglehart looked at more than 60 countries around the world and found that, from the early ’80s through the mid-’90s, women had been moving to the left of men throughout advanced industrial societies. They conclude that “given the process of generational turnover this promises to have profound consequences for the future of the gender cleavage, moving women further left.”
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My name’s Jerusalem Demsas, I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.
While we’re waiting for the sort of definitive data that can help researchers untangle exactly which men were more likely to vote for Donald Trump and why, I wanted to revisit one of my favorite conversations of the year, with Dr. Alice Evans. Alice is a senior lecturer at King’s College London, whose newsletter, The Great Gender Divergence, has followed research and her own personal travels across the world to understand the root causes of gender inequality.
Trying to understand why it is that relations between young men and women seem so fraught can help us begin to understand the downstream political consequences of these cultural shifts.
Here’s our conversation, originally published back in June.
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Alice, welcome to show.
Alice Evans: Thank you so much. It’s a real pleasure to talk to you because I think we corresponded for a long time, and this is a treat.
Demsas: Yes, yes. Twitter DM-to-podcast pipeline. I feel like that’s what we’re creating right here. So we’re here to talk about the divergence between young men and women’s political views, particularly on sexism. But before we get into that, I just want to ask you: What determines whether someone is sexist? What determines whether they hold sexist beliefs?
Evans: Wow, okay, big question. So, I think, generally, the entire of human history has been incredibly patriarchal. So to answer that question, I need to explain the origins of patriarchy. For thousands and thousands of years, our culture has vilified, blamed disobedient, naughty women. You know, they were witches. They were terrible people. A woman who was disobedient or who wasn’t a virgin was shamed and ostracized. So there is a long history. Sexism is nothing new. And actually over the 20th century, much of the world — Latin America, North America, Europe, and East Asia — have become rapidly more gender equal. So in terms of human history, the big story is the rise of gender equality in much of the world. But certainly sexism persists, and we do see in Europe, in South Korea, in China, in North America, young men expressing what we call hostile sexism. Now, it’s worth distinguishing between hostile sexism and benevolent sexism.
So let’s suppose I’m a patriarch in a conservative society, and I think Women are incompetent, and we don’t want to ruin their little heads, and they can’t take care of these things, so I’ll manage these things for the women who just don’t know any better. So that’s benevolent sexism. Hostile sexism is a sense of resentment of women’s gains. So when we ask questions like, women’s rights are expanding at the expense of men, or women are getting these handouts, or men are the ones who are discriminated against. It’s a sense of resentment, the thing that feminism has gone too far, that women are getting all these perks, and so you know, every day as a woman, I wake up with a free fruit basket, right?
Demsas: Wait, I didn’t get mine this morning. I’ll have to check in.
Evans: Yeah, exactly. But this is a real, I think—so I’ve done interviews across the U. S., in Chicago and Stanford and in Montgomery, in California, in New Haven, in New York, in Toronto, in Poland, in Warsaw, in Krakow, in Barcelona, in London. And a lot of young men do feel this sense of resentment. And you can understand it. If you feel that life is hard, if you feel that you’re struggling to get ahead—so we know as college enrollment increases, it’s become really, really hard to make it into a top college place.
Demsas: Let’s step back for a second, This question, though, that I have is, you’re raising this question of young men feeling this resentment. Are young men becoming more sexist? Is that what you’re seeing in the data?
Evans: I think it depends on how we phrase it. So, in terms of, yes, young men are much more likely to say, Yes, women could work, they can go out to clubs, they can do whatever they like, they can be totally free, and young men will support and vote for female leaders. So in terms of support for recognizing women’s capabilities, absolutely, younger generations tend to be much more gender equal, and that holds across the board. The only exceptions are places like North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia where there’s no difference between young men and their grandfathers. But in culturally liberal economically developed countries in the West and East, young men are more supportive. But, sorry, I should have been more clear, they do express this hostile sexism, so this sense of resentment that women’s rights are coming at men’s expense. But that’s not all men, right? And so it’s only a small fraction of young men. You know, many young men are very, very progressive and they’ll vote for Hillary Clinton, et cetera.
Demsas: I just want to drill down into what exactly we’re talking about, right? Because I think most people know there’s a gender gap between men and women, and let’s start in the American context here. People know that with Trump—you have almost 60 percent of women are supporting Biden, while a majority of men back Trump.What’s actually happening here in the U. S. context that’s new, that’s interesting, that’s driving this conversation?
Evans: It’s difficult to know why people do stuff, so everything I say is speculative. What I’m trying to do is when I look at the data, I try to understand, you know, what are structural trends affecting one particular generation that distinct from other generations and why would it be happening in particular parts of the world and not others? So here are three big structural drivers that I’m not a hundred percent sure about, but I would suggest them as likely hypotheses. One is that men care about status. Everyone cares about status. Big examples of status goods include getting a great place at university, being able to afford a nice house, and also having a beautiful girlfriend. Those three things—good education because that matters for signaling for credentials; good place to live; and a pretty, pretty wife or girlfriend—those are your three status goods. Each of those three things has become much, much harder to get. So if we look, as university enrollment rises, as it has, it becomes much harder to get to the top, to get to the Ivy League, right? So only a small percentage of people will get to the top, but those getting to the Ivy League is so important for future networks. Meanwhile, those who don’t even have bachelor’s degrees will really struggle to get higher wages. So one is that men are struggling to get those top university places, which are important for jobs. Then on top of that, housing has become much more expensive. And the gap between wages and house prices has massively increased. Especially if you don’t have inherited wealth. So for the guy whose parents were not rich, it becomes so much harder to get onto the property ladder. So it’s especially hard for these young men to get status. Now, a third and really important factor is that it’s become harder to get girlfriends. So as societies become more culturally liberal, open minded, and tolerant, women are no longer shamed, derided, and ostracized for being single without a boyfriend. You know, in previous decades or centuries —
Demsas: I don’t know. Some women are, some women are.
Evans: Well, compare over time, over time, right? So this isn’t saying there’s zero stigma. It’s saying, Look at change over time. So in previous decades, a woman who was not married and didn’t have babies by the time she was 30 might be seen as a total loser and totally stigmatized. That’s true in South Korea, China, Japan, the U.S., and Europe. But as women are not facing that pressure and that ostracism, they can become financially independent. Women’s wages are approximating men’s. They can inherit parental wealth and buy their own property. So that means that women don’t necessarily need a man. So demand for male partners has plummeted because of that economic development and cultural liberalization. As a result, Pew data tells us that 39 percent of adult American men are currently unpartnered.
Demsas: So basically you have these three buckets here that you’re talking about. You’re saying that you see this divergence with young men in particular because young men, I guess, are concerned with status in a particular way, and that the economic circumstances of our moment in time here in the U.S. have made it more difficult because of home prices, because of diverging outcomes for people with a college degree versus those without. And then finally that because of women’s increased opportunities that they’re able to actually reject men that they feel like don’t give them either economic security or the love or respect. And in previous generations, they would have had to make do because they weren’t afforded that freedom in society. Is that kind of getting at what you’re—
Evans: Perfect. You’ve said it far better than me. For example, young women will say to me on dating apps, they just give up because these men are boring, right? So if a man is not charming, then what is he offering? A woman is looking for loving companionship, someone who’s fun, someone who’s nice to spend time with. But if the guy can’t offer that, then—so in turn, this is hurtful for men. Men aren’t these powerful patriarchs policing women. In fact, they’re guys with emotions who—and nobody wants to be ghosted, to be rejected, to feel unwanted. So if men go on these dating apps and they’re not getting any likes, and even if they speak to her when she doesn’t have the time of day, it just bruises and grates at your ego, your sense of worth. And so then, men may turn to podcasts or YouTube, and if you look at that manosphere, if you look at what people are talking about, it’s often dating. And so they’re often saying, Oh, women have become so greedy. They’re so materialistic. We see this vilification of women. So that kind of filter bubble, once you self-select into it, you become surrounded by this sense of righteous resentment and, oh, you know, It’s not your fault for lack of studying in schools, it’s women are getting all this positive discrimination. Women are getting all these benefits, you know, every, all these companies are hiring women because they feel they have to, because that’s woke nowadays. So if you hear all that kind of angry discourse, and the same goes in South Korea where I was earlier this year. There is a sexist, discriminatory law which mandates that men have to go into military conscription. And that’s terrible, it’s very abusive, it’s hierarchical, it’s unpleasant, lots of men commit suicide, and that is now increasingly used as a way of signaling that life is very unfair for men. And so men are facing a tough time, and then social media, which they’re self selecting into, can reinforce the legitimacy of that.
Demsas: So I’m glad you broadened this out of the U.S. context because I think that while you’ve told a story that I think is familiar to a lot of people hearing this podcast here in the U. S., this is not just happening here. There is this really interesting study by some Swedish political scientists where they look at 32,000 people across 27 countries in the EU, and they’re finding that young men are particularly likely to see advances in women’s rights as a threat to men’s opportunities, right? So similar to what you. And it’s interesting ‘cause it’s compared to older men, right? Like, the group that expresses most opposition to women’s rights are young men while women across all age cohorts show very low levels of opposition to women’s rights. And older men seem indistinguishable often in their peer groups to women their age. And young men really jump out there. And they offer a couple of explanations to that. They say that it’s about whether or not young men feel the institutions in their area are fair or discriminatory. And they say that if there is, you know, downturns in the economy, that that makes young men even more likely to express hostility, this sort of hostile sexism you’re talking about towards women. But why is that affecting young men differently than it’s affecting their older male counterparts?
Evans: Right, great question. And also I was just looking at work by Lisa Blaydes finding that young men in Qatar are most opposed to women in the workforce. And I think it could be this heightened sense of competition. So now, women are outpacing men in terms of education. So they’re a real threat in terms of competition for top jobs, which is also so important for housing. So I think that the competition, right? So if you care about status, if you care about getting to the top, the competition is fiercest now.
Demsas: But aren’t middle-aged men also in competition with women for jobs? You know, 25 doesn’t mean you stop having competition in the labor market. I mean, 30 year old men, 40 year old men, 50 year old men, all these men are still working.
Evans: Right, absolutely, but we now see so many more women who are educated and ready and eager to go into the workforce and aiming for those top jobs with high aspiration and also getting those very top jobs is very important in order to afford decent housing.
Demsas: Gotcha.
Evans: Right, so when people say, Oh, you know, Gen Z have it better than ever because they’ve got higher wages, what we need to think about is people care about status. So they care about their place in the pecking order.
Demsas: And so it’s like if you’re an older man living in an EU country, right? You may see young women now entering the labor force, but, on mass, they’re often not in direct competition for your job. So you feel maybe a benevolent sexism towards them, but you don’t feel this potential zero-sum mindset. And also, maybe you’ve already bought into the market, so you didn’t experience this runup in housing prices in the same way before you were able to buy a home. So that’s kind of what differentiates these groups?
Evans: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. I totally agree. I think housing is really hitting young people. And if you look in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders did very well. And he was really campaigning, focusing on young people and their concerns about housing, right? So this is a major, major issue that young people just cannot—so many people in their 20s and even 30s in Europe are still sharing with roommates, right? So they just feel trapped. You’re still in this limbo. You can’t afford your own place. That hits people hard, especially as it then worsens their prospects in dating and marriage, right? So it’s harder to date. If you’re still living with roommates, you’ve got less to offer, so I just think it hits men multiple times, just feeling—no one wants to feel like a loser, right? So anything that makes you feel like you’re not doing so well. So if we see a rise in inequality, a rise in income inequality, a rise in housing inequality, that in turn affects your ability to date, especially as demand for men goes down.
Demsas: But what’s also happening in a lot of these countries, at least in the U.S. context, right, is that it’s not just that men are sort of reacting to these economic circumstances. It’s also that women are becoming more progressive over time. So is it an interaction between those things that’s maybe driving this gender divergence? Or how much of it is just that men are getting more conservative versus women are also getting more progressive?
Evans: Okay, excellent. I want to make two more points. One is that there’s been some nice research about women becoming more progressive. I think that might affect men’s conservatism in two ways. There’s nice research in Spain showing that after the 2018 Women’s March, then there was a rise in hostile sexism, which in turn led to more votes for the far-right party Vox. So that’s a sense of patriarchal backlash. Also, if we look at the data on men becoming more conservative in South Korea, it exactly precisely times #MeToo. So in South Korea—which is a society which idealizes collective harmony, but there’s also been a lot of spycams and sexual harassment and covert pornography—women organized in backlash. They organized for an end to impunity. Thousands and thousands of women marched and mobilized. But that triggered a lot of a reactionary movement of male solidarity, male hostile sexism. So in both Spain and South Korea, it’s women’s mobilization, women becoming more progressive and outwardly saying, We don’t want to tolerate this. We won’t tolerate this anymore. This led to hostile sexism, which in turn, many politicians have mobilized, have used and marshaled for their gains. So in Spain, the Vox party has often said, Well, you know, there are these cases of false accusations. In South Korea too, the president was actually elected on a wave of hostile sexism. He was campaigning to abolish the gender ministry. He was sort of an anti-feminist president.
Also, there’s very nice research by Jay Van Bavel and others, and they show that on social media, it tends to be the most extreme groups that are the most vocal. So if you imagine a distribution of people, people at the 5 percent of either end—the two poles—they’re the ones who shout the loudest. And so if you imagine there’s this very, very extremist feminist person shouting loudly, that person may then get parroted by the right wing media and say, Oh, this is what feminists think. And that can accentuate the backlash. So even though the vast majority of women are much more moderate, much more in the middle, the ones who shout the loudest may then trigger that backlash effect. The most extreme feminist views can trigger a backlash against feminism, even if most women really aren’t on board with those ideas, so I think there’s a social media effect.
Demsas: You’ve identified three large ways that these divides between young men and women are growing. You talk about this and a high-unemployment or low-growth trap, that young men might be feeling more viscerally than young women because of their expectations around status. You talk about—
Evans: Wait, wait, wait. Let me clarify. So in the U. S., you don’t have high unemployment, but you do have that status inequality.
Demsas: Yeah.
Evans: So that resembles—sorry, I should just clarify that. So it can work. As long as you’ve got inequality, then you’re going to have this sense of resentment. I really think it’s inevitable.
Demsas: No, I think that’s a great point because I was literally just going to ask you right then just, you know, U.S. has extremely low unemployment right now and you see varying amounts of economic cases across the EU and the world.
And you’re going from South Korea where you have also really great economic circumstances all the way to countries like Indonesia where things look very different. And so I think that that’s a really helpful corrective. But I want to zero in on these two other things that you were just talking about. But let’s just start with the social media bubbles, right? Because I find this interesting that, if you were to ask me before I’d looked into any of this, whether social media would make you have to hear from and interact with people more different than who you are versus people who are similar to you, I would’ve thought, Yeah, I can’t really control the next tweet that my algorithm shows me if I’m on Tumblr in high school and I’m looking through different blogs. I don’t really know the genders of people immediately when those things pop up on my page. So I feel like it would be a way of actually facilitating a ton of information across genders, right? But what you say is that social media actually allows for you to create these bubbles, and that it creates this feedback loop for people who are young women who are to become more liberal and young men to become more regressive. I mean, you use this term called manosphere earlier. Can you talk a little bit about what that is? What’s actually happening there?
Evans: Yes, absolutely. But first, before we get to social media, I think it’s important to recognize that this is part of a broader process of culture where there are many kinds of filter bubbles. So as women have forged careers and become journalists, podcasters, writers, screenwriters, they have championed their ideals of empathy and tolerance and equality. And then on top of that, David Rozado shows that over the 2010s, media increasingly reported more attention to sexism, more attention to racism. So people are becoming more aware of the sense of unfairness and inequalities. On top of that, the social media companies, they want to keep their users hooked. And they do this by making their apps enjoyable and addictive, so they provide content that they think you will like, that your friends and peers also liked. They think that they show things similar to what you’ve already liked, and they also might show sensational content. But the more that they send you things similar to what you’ve already liked, then you become cocooned in this echo chamber of groupthink whereby everyone is agreeing with you. So even if there are these structural economic drivers that push men to become more attuned or sympathetic to Andrew Tate, we then get these echo chambers whereby that’s all you’re hearing.
Demsas: But when you describe the media environment, that’s just one way that people engage in social media, but when you’re thinking about your algorithm, like I said, aren’t there tons of ways then that social media has actually broken that? Because now, you go on your Twitter and yeah, your algorithm may push you more towards certain kinds of content, but it also opens you up to very different views. And the reason I’m asking this is because one of the biggest theories about how people break down prejudice is this thing called contact theory, where you come into contact with individuals of a group that you have prejudice against, and then as you see, Oh, this is just a person just like me, you end up breaking down a lot of your prejudices because they become beaten by reality. So why doesn’t that happen? Why don’t you see that sort of interaction happening on social media?
Evans: I think that’s a theoretical possibility of the internet, but in reality, people are much more tribal. They gravitate towards things that they like, towards things that they already know, towards things that already make them feel comfortable. People are incredibly—they do so many things on trust, like, Oh, is this someone I know? Okay, I’ll trust them and listen to them. Is this person part of my group? And I think in America, particularly, you see that ideological polarization. If you’re told that, Oh, the Democrats support this, and you’re a Democrat, people tend to support it. So I think a lot of things are done on a very tribal, trusting basis, and although you and I might idealize a fantasy internet where people mix and mingle and learn from diversity, in truth, people tend to gravitate towards their group.
Demsas: Yeah, for me I diverge a little bit. I think that it’s maybe different for different folks. I mean, this is why, as you said earlier, while you do see young men sort of diverging, as expressing more sexist attitudes, that’s just a portion of young men, right? That’s, as you said, it’s not every single young man. And I would have to think that a lot of them are actually coming into contact with some of these conversations that are happening cross gender, cross ideology, whether it’s online or it’s in their school, in school or whatever it is.
Evans: Okay, excellent, so we know that young people spend a huge amount of their time on their phones—maybe five hours—and a lot of these YouTube shorts or TikToks are very, very short. They could be 30 seconds. They could be a minute. That’s not enough time to cultivate empathy, to understand someone’s particular predicament, why they made those choices and the difficulties of their life. So and then if it’s too short to build empathy, then you’re just going to stick with your priors. So, social psychologists talk about confirmation bias, that we tend to pay more attention to information that fits with our priors. So we seek out information that already fits with our priors, we ignore disconfirming evidence. So on social media where you’re getting all this short information, you’re just looking for things that are nice, that make you feel comfortable.
Demsas: But, you know, one question I actually had for me, that’s part of this is there’s this concept called group threat theory, right? Where you think about someone else as being the cause of your—some other group as being the cause of your misfortune. And identifying who that group is, though, is not just natural, right? That doesn’t happen out of the ether. Because, you know, young men could be experiencing this sort of status threat, they could see this widening inequality, and they don’t have to turn against women, right? They could say instead, Actually, the problem is, you know, Catholics, or, The problem is whatever, you know, people from Namibia, whatever it is. And then you can just create these groups. So it seems like a lot of your argumentation around this has been around looking at cultural entrepreneurs who weaponize these moments to point you at a group. Can you tell us, what’s a cultural entrepreneur? What are they doing?
Evans: So this has existed throughout history. You know, there was a Mamluk Sultan of Egypt called Barsbay. And after the price of bread went up, uh, he blamed it on the women. And he said it was women were responsible for creating public discord. And he banished them back to their homes. And so, you know, women were to blame for all these terrible things that have happened. So throughout history, if you have a vulnerable group that cannot protect itself, it might be blamed, you know, similarly in the count, in the struggle between Protestants and Catholics, then priests would vilify women and identify witches to prove their superior power to vanquish the devil. Right? So if there is this small isolated group that is less powerful, you can vilify them. And so we see that in regards, you know, xenophobia, Islamophobia in India, right? The BJP being anti-Muslim. We see it in every single society, but it’s just a cultural innovation, which group is going to be blamed. But I think—and so people like podcasters might vilify women as getting these handouts, or they might vilify Ukrainian refugees as getting these handouts in Poland, or it’s these migrants at the border that are causing all these sorts of problems. So it’s someone—rather than, you know, a financial entrepreneur is one who looks at the market and thinks, Hey, I’m going to exploit this opportunity and make some money, a cultural entrepreneur is someone who says, Hey, I’m seeing this sea of discontent. I’m going to rise up, build a following, and possibly make money, but also get social respect, etcetera.
Demsas: So these cultural entrepreneurs have a lot of power, right? It’s really contingent on who ends up being more persuasive, who ends up making either the best arguments or swaying the most people over onto their side because they’re charismatic. And one thing that’s been really interesting to me is it’s possible that men could feel like women are an asset, that the fact that they can work wage-paying jobs is an asset to them when there’s an economic downturn. Like, Great. It’s not just my brothers or my dad or my sons that can help me. Now my wife, my daughter, my sisters can help if there’s a problem, too. And I wonder if this also plays into why it’s younger men that are actually the ones that end up being more hostile towards women’s advancing rights because they’re less likely to be partnered already. So why isn’t it that you don’t see actually greater excitement that women can actually be helping bring in money in this context?
Evans: Okay, so that’s a great point, a plausible argument, but I think in previous generations, the younger, unpartnered men might still support this, be less likely to endorse hostile sexism. Maybe because they thought they were going to do better in the labor market. Now, I think an extra factor that’s happening right now that’s really important for explaining this, in terms of statistics: One, it is the women who are the major competition in employment because they’re super, super educated, often more educated than men. Two, these heterosexual men wanting girlfriends. So the people who are rejecting them, the people who they think are snubbing them are literally women. So I think there is a direct confrontation, so I think the idea of scapegoating and vilifying women is inevitable because of that competition of the sexes, so to speak. That said, there’s this nice draft by Thomas Piketty, the scholar of inequality, showing that richer, super educated men are much more likely to vote Democrat. So, when men can achieve these super high salaries, right, those men are super secure, so they don’t have that status competition. Now, I think that the point you made about relationships is really important and—
Demsas: Yeah, because I was just going to think, Is it just about dating? How much of this is just if you were partnered, then basically you don’t feel this way?
Evans: Yeah, I think that’s great. So there’s this very nice paper showing that fathers of daughters were less likely to interrupt Janet Yellen in her congressional hearings. So if you want the best for your daughter and you aspire for her to do well, and then you empathize with women’s concerns, and maybe you’re less of a dickhead, right, in public life. So I certainly see that can happening. But I still think if we look back at the historical record, there are plenty of cases where men might support their wives working, but still be pretty hostile in general. So we go back to the guilds in medieval Europe. A man and a wife might collaborate together. He might bequeath his estate to her, but European guilds that’s a proto-trade union, they might exclude women because they wanted to preserve and monopolize their benefits. The same goes for trade unions in the 19th and early 20th century—very, very sexist. So sadly, I don’t think—that doesn’t seem from the family, from the historical record, that just having a relationship will necessarily mean a benign attitude to women in general.
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Demsas: We’re going to take a quick break. More with Alice when we get back.
[Break]
Demsas: All this gets me thinking, you know, a lot of the explanations are, you know, they’re structural in that they would happen to like basically every generation of young men, obviously, social media is a bit different, but other than that, you would see this in the past, as well, and so my question for you is—we see right now that a lot of people are talking about this potential threat of the great gender divergence between women and young women and men in politics. And I wonder, would young men always have been relatively more zero-sum in their thinking with young women? Even in past generations, we just don’t have the data to compare.
Evans: Okay, so let me say three things. First of all, it’s now that we see this rise of men being unpartnered. So previously the Pew data was showing a far smaller fraction of men were unpartnered. So previously, when women were culturally compelled to marry, you know, when it was just a normal thing to get married and have babies before you are 30, then you’re going to have more demand for men. So the mediocre man was going to do okay with the ladies. So he wasn’t getting those constant rejections and ghosting which grates at the male ego. So today is very, very different in terms of men’s difficulty of getting, you know, all these things, all these things that I’m talking about, uh, are big structural changes, the difficulty of getting to a top university, the difficulty of getting a decent housing in cities, especially the difficulty of getting a pretty girlfriend or a girlfriend at all, all those things are much, much harder for, say, the median guy. The median guy is struggling to get status, and that’s happening now.
Demsas: So one of the things I think is interesting about this phenomenon is that you’re doing a lot of work that looks at what’s happening with young men and women’s attitudes, not just in the U.S. or the U.K., but you’re also looking across a bunch of contexts. So I want to go into a couple different countries to see how these trends are actually playing out given the cultural context that exists there. So, firstly, can you take us to Qatar? And I’m interested in Qatar because it’s a highly developed nation, right? This is not a poor country by any means. So tell us what’s going on there. Why do we see this sort of divergence between young men and women?
Evans: Yeah, this is super fascinating, right? I’ve never been to Qatar, so I am cautious here. But piecing together other materials that I’ve read about the existing published literature: One, I think it’s important to recognize it’s a hugely unequal society. So, even if everyone’s incomes are high, people still care about that place and their pecking order. Second, on social media, I think social media can even amplify people’s perceptions of inequality because the kind of stuff that goes viral—and this goes for both pretty women and successful men—are the superstars, right? So, it’s the beautiful, beautiful women who get thousands and thousands of likes and then trigger anxiety amongst other women. And similarly for men in Qatar, it’s the Sheikhs, the rulers, the crown princes who show off their Lamborghinis and Porsches that are worth several million dollars. And so this sense of, I want to be at the top—because being at the top of society brings status, it brings social respect, it brings prestige, it brings admiration. Other people admire you if you’re doing well compared to others. So, in Qatar, women are now super, super educated, the younger generation of women really want to work, and I think it’s possible that they present a challenge to young men. And what’s really, really fascinating is when I look at data on maths and reading, we see women in Qatar are far outpacing men. It’s not just that they’re more likely to be university educated, but their maths scores are off the board, off the chart. So the gender gap in terms of competence is astronomical.
Demsas: I wanted us to move to a different part of the world. I wanted to move us to Indonesia, and the reason I want to talk about Indonesia is, you know, I remember in 2010 when then-President Barack Obama went to Indonesia and hailed it as this example of a democratic, multi-ethnic, multi-racial society. Particularly at a time where he was trying to tamp down on xenophobia and anti-Muslim behavior or anti-Muslim attitudes in the West and in the U.S. after 2001 and the 9/11 attacks. And so, I was really interested because what ends up happening in the subsequent years is that Indonesia really turns against this example. And you end up seeing that a lot of people, democratically, are wanting actually many more illiberal things. And you actually see young men and young women increasingly pushing towards regressive values, particularly on gender. And so you wrote about this, and you wrote about this survey that the Indonesian government did in 2019. And I want to just talk about this a bit, because I think it speaks to how it’s not just men that reinforce patriarchal attitudes, so that women can have a role in enforcing those as well.
In this 2019 government survey of Indonesian women, they’re looking at 15- to 19-year-old girls, right? And they ask them, When is it justified for a husband to hit or beat his wife? They ask, Is it when she burns his food, when she argues with him, when she goes out without telling him, when she neglects his kids, when she refuses to have sex with him? They tallied up all of those things, and amongst 15- to 19-year-old girls, over 40 percent of them agreed with at least one of those as a justification for domestic violence. And then you look up the age groups, you look at 20 to 24, you look at 25 to 29, you look at 45 to 49, no one is above 40 percent. At 45 to 49, it’s actually only 27 percent agree with at least one of those things. What’s going on there? Why are young women in this context maybe turning against women’s rights in contrast with their older peers?
Evans: I was actually listening to Barack Obama’s speech in Indonesia the other day. And he quoted the Indonesian national motto, which is like, Unity in diversity. And it’s always had this big history of celebrating their diversity. But what we’ve seen over the past 20 years in Indonesia, and actually in many Muslim countries across the world, is many people increasingly embracing a very strict Salafist interpretation of Islam and adopting very strict ideas of gender segregation and female seclusion, and men and women keeping their distance from each other. And so many people are—so I think what’s caused that? One is: Saudi Arabia has become rich on the back of Western and global demand for oil, and that has enabled it to export these Salafist ideologies through investing in mosques, madrassas.
Demsas: And what’s a madrasa?
Evans: A madrasa is an Islamic school, so you learn about the Prophet, you learn about Sharia law, you also learn about gender segregation—the idea that a modest woman, a good woman, will stay away from men, and she will not laugh, chat, and socialize with them. And that sexes should keep their distance from each other. And one possible reason—even in urban areas, girls are more likely to go to these Islamic educational institutions—and one possibility is that, as men become more religious, they want religious wives. They want wives who will be obedient. In Islam, it says that a wife should obey her husband, 93 percent of Indonesian Muslims say that the wife should obey her husband. And so one: Saudi Arabia funding madrassas. Also: religious righteousness gives people, especially struggling people, a sense of self-worth by doing God’s work. By making these anti-blasphemy accusations, you’ve got moral dignity, you’ve got status, people care about status. And then, as people become more religious, political parties and campaign movements gain votes by courting these preferences. So across Indonesia, in many of the different regions, more schools and more political parties have made laws against blasphemy, mandated hijab laws. There’s been persecution of minorities, and we see this right up until government level and, you know, criminalization of blasphemy being strengthened. So when people say, Oh, it’s a terrible thing, the sexes coming apart. I would say that’s descriptively true, but it’s distinct to economically developed and culturally liberal countries. And when you say it’s a terrible thing, just consider the alternative: what’s happening in many other parts of the world where people think the same thing and sing from the same hymn sheet as they did in the past in the UK and the U.S.
Demsas: One last place I want to take us is a place you’ve mentioned a couple times: South Korea. And the reason I want to ask you about this is because South Korea has the distinction of seeing the lowest fertility rates in the world. Since 2013, they’ve been below everyone else, and right now they’re at 0.72 births per woman, which is really, really low. I wanted to ask if that’s the effect that we might expect to see, because South Korea is a place that’s a highly developed nation, a very rich nation, and at the same time, you see this massive divergence between young men and young women, and I’m wondering is that something that you would expect to see in other nations, if you see this persistence and divergence between young men and women?
Evans: I will say two things. First, on South Korea’s plummeting fertility, I think there are several drivers. First and foremost, the lowest fertility and the most likely to be childless is the poorest South Koreans. So, there’s a great paper by Michèle Tertilt and others, and they highlight the importance of status. And the idea is that South Koreans really care about education. They want their kids to do really well, to get into the top universities—we call them SKY—so they invest enormous amounts in their education, but the poor cannot keep up with the spending of the rich. So maybe you only have one kid, right? You can’t have two kids and educate them well, so that’s one thing, the status competition makes it more exhausting and laborious to have a kid. Secondly, certainly, I think it’s true that as there’s cultural liberalization and people are no longer socially punished if they don’t have a kid, then they can just do their own thing. They can do whatever they like. So for example, when I’m in Zambia or Uzbekistan, the first two questions people will say to me is, Are you married? Do you have kids? And the correct answer is always supposed to be yes, right? But no one in the U. S. will ask me that question. No one has introduced themselves to me saying, Hi, are you married? Do you have kids? No one says that. The way I’m received varies enormously. And so people’s priorities—when I go to conservative countries—people’s priorities, how they want to understand me as a person, first and foremost: Married and kids? Yes or no? So that’s the second mechanism: the less pressure to give birth and have children. And then thirdly, we do see in South Korea many young women saying, Hey, I just don’t want this. I don’t want to be in the same position of my mother who, for Lunar New Year, would have to be the dutiful daughter-in-law serving the husband’s family, doing all the cooking, and not being recognized and rewarded. So: staying single and not wanting to have kids. So for all those three reasons—status, competition, cultural liberalism, and the ideological polarization between young men and women—we might see a fall in fertility, but those three things seem structural and difficult to change. And so I think for those three reasons, you might expect fertility to continue to fall.
Demsas: Well, just so that we don’t leave everyone on the most depressing note possible, I’m wondering, you know, it seems like there’s a lot of malleability and the direction towards making society less gender egalitarian, but that should mean that you could also do the opposite, right? So, what can countries or people do about this? Like, in the 20th century, I imagine there were also a lot of cultural entrepreneurs—whether it’s on TV or the suffragettes or individuals who were, you know, just in daily life really pushing towards a more egalitarian culture. Is that what we need to see now, or are there other things that countries can do to ameliorate the backlash effects that young men are displaying?
Evans: Okay, great. So I maybe sound a little bit Marxian now. I think if you buy my hypothesis that part of this is all about status competition, then one possible mechanism is to reduce that status inequality. So for example, by radically increasing the supply of housing, it’s easier for men to be doing as well as their peers. Right, in both Europe and the US there are a lot of NIMBY restrictions on where you can build and that raises the price of housing. So if housing was cheaper and more affordable and more within reach of young people, then young people would be doing comparably. You wouldn’t have that massive status competition. I think also what’s really important is going back to your point about cultivating empathy and understanding different people’s concerns and perspectives, and that happens through meeting in person. It does not happen through these 30-second TikToks. And so in England, many schools have banned mobile phones. And I think that’s a way, and I think the upside of that is that people will be more present on their interaction with their peers in that classroom. And that’s clearly a collective action problem that Haidt has shown in his new book, you know, no parent wants—
Demsas: Jonathan Haidt.
Evans: Yeah, exactly. No parent wants to do it alone because then their kid is out of the loop. But if everyone is doing it—so I think getting people off their phones and into in-person interactions, you know, hanging out at parties. You know, when I was a teenager, I was always hosting these garage parties. My mother was always away at work and so I was always hosting these garage parties, and people coming over to my house to play Nintendo and, you know—
Demsas: Now, you’d get in trouble for leaving, like, tools hanging up around children.
Evans: I lived a naughty life. I lived in the English countryside, so we had a big treehouse and all sorts of naughty things going on. But anyway, less of my naughtiness, but yes, people interacting in person is really important, going back to the contact hypothesis and building empathy. And then we can also think about these algorithms. So if it’s the case that corporate algorithms are creating a skewed sense of what people see, and creating an unrealistic depiction of social life, then that’s something we could regulate, as we might regulate other areas. So I think those would be the three things for me: the reducing the status competition by boosting the supply of housing, encouraging empathy with more personal interactions by getting kids off their phones, and also thinking about how do you change the algorithm so that people don’t see this distorted sense of humanity, which is just making them think that other people are crazy, when actually, most people are pretty moderate and towards the middle.
Demsas: Well, you were really speaking my language when it comes to housing, so don’t—I have no objections there. Always our final question: What’s an idea that you felt was good on paper, but didn’t pan out in real life?
Evans: Oh my god, so much of my life, so much of my life. I mean, how many Alice Evans stories do you want? I travel the world, so this is like everything I do. I can tell you stories from the Democratic Republic of Congo when things went awry, or I can tell you about me being punched in the face in Mexico.
Demsas: Let’s do punched in the face in Mexico. Let’s do that one.
Evans: [Laughs] So I was — this was last year — I was in Oaxaca, and it was going really well. I was going into these little villages and towns with my iPhone, and I was using Microsoft Translate, and I was having these fantastic conversations with indigenous people. It was tremendous. And everyone was super, super kind and wonderful. And then a guy, in the favela, tried to wrestle me for my phone. Now, the sensible thing would just be to hand over my phone, but I did not do that. For some reason, I decided to wrestle him. And so he kept grabbing at my phone and I did not let him have it. And then what happened is—this is a true story, true story—he threw me to the ground, my head slammed back down on the stone—
Demsas: Oh my God.
Evans: Yeah. True story. And then he got on top of me and punched me in the face, right smack between the eyes on my nose. And what I do is I kick back, double legs in his stomach, propelling him off two meters. Then what happens is he—shocked by this—he goes into his pocket, he grabs a large knife, and what I do? I do a Lara Croft roly poly, spinning off to the side. I then jump up, and then he wrestles me again with the knife. And so it’s at this point that I think, I’m not going to out-fight a man with a knife who does not care at all about my welfare. So at this point, I hand over the phone, and I sprint, and I’m bleeding, and I’m covered in blood. Yeah, that is something that had not gone to plan. Getting punched in the face was not on the agenda.
Demsas: Not good on paper. I mean, it’s just interesting. You said, you know, smartphones—I guess they really, really can cause large harms in society.
Evans: Yeah, we need to be careful about the smartphones and also the idiots that carry them.
[Music]
Demsas: Well, Alice Evans, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. We’re so excited to have you, and we hope to have you back soon.
Evans: Thank you. This has been a pleasure. You’re very kind. Thank you.
Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Or share it with two friends who you think might like it, as well.
I’m Jerusalem Demsas and we’ll see you next week.
[Music]
Demsas: Great.
Evans: We’re culture entrepreneuring right now
Demsas: We’re culture entrepreneuring right now! That’s the whole podcast.
Evans: (Laughs)
