Roosmarijn de Geus, PhD

Recently I’ve been reading a lot about gender gaps in public opinion, one of my favourite topics (I’m a very fun person, promise). One thing that really stands out in these pieces is the increased polarization of political attitudes among young men and women. Examples of this abound. Young men were a key demographic for Donald Trump in the 2024 election, with 54% of young men supporting him. In contrast, 63% of young women (18-29) opted for Harris. This trend extends beyond the US, research on the 2024 European Parliamentary elections found for instance that 24% of young men voted for far-right parties compared to only 14% of young women.

Women have long been shown to be more left-wing than men in general (also called the ‘modern gender gap’), and younger generations of women appear particularly left-leaning compared to the rest of the population. For instance, 84% of young women voted for New York Mayor Zhoran Mamdani, numbers any candidate would dream of. Although, it should be noted that 67% of young men also voted for Mamdani, making him the most popular candidate among this demographic, and potentially suggesting a high volatility in young men’s political attitudes (would love to see some research on that!)

One area where men and women appear to be particularly diverging is gender-related attitudes. For instance, a 2025 report by Ipsos UK and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at KCL finds that of all generations – Gen Z is the most divided on issues related to gender. Issues they look at are whether a man staying home to take care of children is seen as less of a man, people’s willingness to identify as a feminist, and whether respondents think that men are expected to do too much to support gender equality. The study is backed by a lot of data, nearly 24,000 people across 30 countries – and the result really should concern anyone who cares about gender equality. Further, a recent article by Canadian based Environics shows similar trends in Canada and the U.S. The study finds that Gen Z men are less likely to believe in gender equality than boomer generations. By using over time data the report further finds that new generations are in fact less supportive of gender equality than older generations were when they were young.

Reading these reports made me concerned and curious. I wondered whether I could find the same pattern in the data I’ve been working with from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) that focuses on a very specific set of gender-related attitudes, namely childrearing. The ISSP has the benefit that it offers over-time data, going back to 1988. This seemed interesting to me, as it allows me to explore whether gender and age gaps in attitudes have actually gotten larger over time. The downside is that there is a very limited number of questions that has been asked consistently across surveys, and that the group of participant countries varies strongly with each survey.

I focus here on a question that was asked in every survey since the ISSP’s inception, so in 1988, 1994, 2002, 2012 and 2022. The statement put to respondents was: “a pre school child is likely to suffer when his/her mother works.” Respondents could reply on a 5-point scale ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.” The analyses below show the percentage of respondents that either agree or strongly agreed with the statement and thus convey gender in-egalitarian attitudes. I limit my analysis to countries that are covered in most of the survey waves and that I happen to know well: the United States, the Netherlands and the UK. Canada only participated in 1994 and 2012 which doesn’t help me much in this case.

In the graph below I compare Young people (30 or younger) in the 1988 survey with Old people (65 or older) in the 1988 survey and continue this throughout the other survey years. Note these are what’s called ‘repeated cross-sections’ which means I take people who are 20 (or 60) at the time of the survey, I do not have the same people across survey waves. So these graphs do not show the same people over time and therefore do not capture whether someone’s attitudes change over time. Also note that the UK did not participate in the 2022 survey so the most recent data is from 2012.

Something really interesting jumps out immediately. The difference between old people and young people in attitudes toward the effects of working women on their children was much larger in the 1980’s than it was in 2022.  The main source of this change is older people. Older people in 1988 were much more gender-conservative than older people are nowadays. In the 1988 survey approximately 60-80% (look at those high numbers in the Netherlands!) of older people thought it was harmful to a pre-school child to have a working mother. This drops to about 20% of older people in the US and Netherlands and 40% in the UK in the most recent 2022 survey (2012 in the UK case). This means a drop of 20-40 percentage points among older people depending on the country we look at. In contrast, young people’s attitudes have remained much more stable over time. Support for this statement was around 30% in the US and UK in 1988 among young people and about 50% in the Netherlands. In 2022 this drops to about 20%, a much more moderate drop of 10-20 percentage points over time.

There are clear country differences in the levels of support, but the overall pattern is very similar. There is now a much smaller age-gap in gender equality attitudes in these countries, caused mostly by the very substantive shift in attitudes of older generations. The fact that younger generations are much more stable over time results in the fact that – as the other studies have shown – young people have now very similar levels of gender inequality to older people.

Now to look at gender differences: did men or women experience a larger shift in attitudes? Before discussing the graph I want to point out that these data are based on sub-sets (age and gender) making some groups very small (fewer than 50 people). This means that small differences are likely not meaningful, rather I look at the overall trends and pattern in the direction of attitudes, not at specific levels or level differences at any point in time.

Reflective of the general trends above, we observe that older men and women more move than younger men and women. Specifically, across all countries we see very strong movement in the attitudes of older women (green lines). Older women in the 2022 survey are much more gender egalitarian than older women in the 1988 survey, suggesting a very strong impact of changes in attitudes about women and work over time. In the US in 1988 almost 60% of older women agreed that working harmed a pre-school child, in 2022 this is less than 10%. In the Netherlands the percentages shift from 80% of older women in 1988 to just 20% in 2022. The drop is less dramatic in the UK, but still substantive moving from 60% to about 20%. Older men undergo a similar shift in the US and the Netherlands, but interestingly move much less in the UK. Despite big shifts in attitudes, older men do remain the most gender-conservative when it comes to this question across countries, even in 2022.

Interestingly, younger generations are quite different across countries. Young men (blue lines) in the Netherlands in 1988 appear particularly conservative in their attitudes, with 60% suggesting children experience harm when mothers work. This contrasts with the UK and US where only 40% of young men were of this opinion in 1988. In all countries this percentage halves by 2022. There is still a substantial gap between young men and older men, even as young men and older women converge more.

Young women (red lines) in the US have always been substantially more gender egalitarian than other groups and this is consistent across time, with a move toward more gender egalitarianism in the last wave. Interestingly, the age gap between old and young women all but disappears in the US in 2022. In the Netherlands young women are also consistently the most progressive group, and convergence of young men and old women now means it’s older men that are the strongest outlier there.

In the UK movement is different, norms surrounding working women appear much more gradual. We see the general shift of older women in the UK toward more gender egalitarianism, but the other three groups remain much more constant over time. There is an odd uptick among young women in agreement with this statement between 2002 and 2012, though given the aforementioned sample sizes this might be noise. It’s a real shame here that the UK data ends in 2012 as it would be fascinating to see how these patterns develop in 2022.

All in all – what to take from this? It’s true that if we look at the levels of agreement and disagreement with this particular statement on gender equality that there are gaps between young men and women, and that young women in particular are the most gender egalitarian. Further, in the US and the Netherlands at least, attitudes of young men are similar to attitudes of old men. Suggesting that young men are equally gender-egalitarian / or in-egalitarian. However, the over-time view gives us some additional insights. This convergence in attitudes is caused mostly by the large shift toward gender egalitarianism of older generations. Older generations in 1988 were born in the 1920s and hence their attitudes toward gender differ significantly from older generations now, who would have been born in the 1950s and ’60s. Decades of feminism and generational replacement have resulted in the fact that older generations now are much more gender egalitarian than they were in the ’80s.

At the same time, generational replacement of younger generations has shown much smaller shifts. Younger generations now are more similar than younger generations in the ’80s than is the case for older generations. Younger women in the US and the Netherlands have shown further moves toward gender egalitarianism, but movement is more limited in the U.K. Young men have shifted too between 1988 and 2022, and they have moved toward gender egalitarianism, but their substantive levels of gender in-egalitarianism have always been higher than those of young women – and this has not changed with time.