Swiping left or right?

A Valentine’s Day follow-up on the ideological divide between younger men and women

I was going to move on to a new topic and leave the issue of the social and political attitudes of younger men and women aside, but then another column caught my eye.

Writing in The Globe and Mail, Phoebe Maltz Bovy reviewed a number of reactions to the column I discussed in my last post on the supposed widening ideological divide between men and women. Apparently, several commentators, whether tongue-in-cheek or not, seem to have concluded that both marriage and the reproduction of the species are threatened by the fact that younger men and women increasingly find each other’s politics abhorrent. On Valentine’s Day, it seems appropriate to investigate this further.

Last time, I looked at whether the views of younger men and women are diverging (mostly, they are not). But in doing so, we saw that younger men are nonetheless a little more conservative. Leaving aside the question of change over time, how big is this difference today? In Canada, could it be that young men are from Souris–Moose Mountain, while young women are from Winnipeg Centre?

Well, not really. Here’s where they place themselves on the left-right scale:

Women age 18 to 34 are a little more likely to place themselves on the left and in the centre of the political spectrum; men in this age group are a little more likely to place themselves on the right.

To put things in perspective, imagine a night club filled with 100 men and 100 women of this age (and, for the sake of this example, assume that all are interested in pairing with the opposite gender). Of these 200 individuals, 168 could meet up with a person of the other gender who place themselves on the exact same spot on the left-right scale. Six more (3 men and 3 women) would have to compromise by one spot near the centre-right (3 women who are a “6” on the left-right scale would have to hang out with 3 men who are a “7”). That means 174 of 200 could find an almost perfect ideological match.

This leaves 13 women on the left or in the centre, facing 12 men on the right. Maybe some of these 25 individuals will end up writing opinion columns about the great gender ideological divide. (If you’re adding all this up, you’ll notice we lost one person to the rounding of the decimal points; that’s math for you.)

The similarities also overshadow the differences if we look at attitudes toward diversity. Overall, roughly 20 to 25 percent of younger Canadians hold dissenting opinions on questions relating to multiculturalism, immigration or Indigenous Peoples (i.e., they disagree with positively-phrased statements). The differences between levels of disagreement between younger men and younger women are negligible. Luckily or unluckily, depending on your perspective – and still using our hypothetical example of the night club – a younger person uncomfortable with immigration or multiculturalism has pretty good odds of finding a person of another gender who shares their views.

There are certainly some exceptions. Younger women are more lopsidedly in favour of equal rights for LGBTQ2S+ people than are younger men; in some surveys, women also appear a little more worried than men about climate change. But the extent of these differences is modest; most men and women in this age group share similar opinions.

It would be nice to end this Valentine’s Day post on this happy note: ideological differences do not seem to be posing a growing threat to romance among the country’s young adults. But I have to emphasize again that there are some important age and gender differences in Canada – in the area of mental health and well-being, rather than politics (see our previous reports here, here and here).

Younger women are the most likely to report poor mental health. All this brouhaha about whether there is a gulf between young progressive women and young conservative men, while entertaining, risks diverting attention from topics where the evidence of gender differences is much more solid.

Most of the data presented in this post are from the Canadian portion of the 2023 AmericasBarometer. The AmericasBarometer is a biennial comparative survey of democratic values and behaviours that covers countries in North, Central and South America, as well as a significant number of countries in the Caribbean (the 2023 survey covers 25 countries). The project is led by the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) at Vanderbilt University. 

The survey is the most comprehensive source of information about support for democracy in Canada. Follow the Environics Institute to catch more reports from this survey.

The 2023 AmericasBarometer in Canada survey was conducted by the Environics Institute for Survey Research, in partnership with LAPOP at Vanderbilt University. It was conducted online with a representative sample of 2,500 Canadians (aged 18 and over) between July 20 and August 4, 2023. The author is solely responsible for any errors of presentation or interpretation.

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