Women are lurching to the left. Why aren’t men following them?

Taylor Swift, poet laureate of girls, has a new boyfriend. Anyone who has an internet connection and eyes will have clocked this. She is in a relationship with Travis Kelce, an American football hero who was already quite famous as tight-end for the Kansas City Chiefs. When Swift started turning up at his games, he got much, much more famous.

Footage of the pop star delightedly hugging and kissing Kelce as he won a recent match, catapulting him to the Super Bowl in a fortnight’s time, went viral last week. So did right-wing conspiracy theories, aired breezily on Fox News, about Swift being a Pentagon-planted “asset” infiltrating America’s beloved game.

Images and footage of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce kissing have gone viral. Credit: AP

Cue a new wave of nasty right-wing trolling of Swift – yet another dire measure of the bogusness of the MAGA Republicans. They fear Swift because she is enormously popular and has endorsed Democrat Party candidates. Polling shows nearly 20 per cent of voters would be influenced by which candidate she endorses. She’s an incredible songwriter; she also has the power to impact elections.

The political weaponisation of Swift’s private life is indicative of the increasing ideological polarisation of the United States; polarisation which is radiating outwards to the rest of the globe (with some eager encouragement from self-interested politicians).

Football and love – two solid sources of human happiness – are turned into political battlefields, injected with misinformation and vitriol. For those of us who like to win, it is depressing.

And it comes as some pundits express anxiety about the new political divide opening up in younger generations. Research from across the globe shows today’s under-30s are pulling apart, politically, along gender lines, and one Washington Post editorial from last year worried that this might hasten the collapse of marriage as an institution.

The editorial cited research showing that since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the percentage of 18- to 30-year-old single women who identify as liberal increased from 20 to 32 per cent. Young men have not become more liberal – if anything, they have become more conservative.

“In another era, political or ideological differences might have had less impact on marriage rates,” the editorial stated. But politics was becoming more central to a person’s sense of their own identity, and “this mismatch will mean someone will have to compromise”.

An article in the British Financial Times discussed the same fascinating trend. “In countries on every continent, an ideological gap has opened up between young men and women,” it reported. “Tens of millions of people who occupy the same cities, workplaces, classrooms and even homes no longer see eye-to-eye.”

It cited US data showing 18- to 30-year-old women are 30 percentage points more liberal than men the same age. In Germany, the gap is also 30 percentage points, and in the UK it is 25 percentage points. The trend is even more pronounced in Poland, where almost half of young men (18- to 21-year-olds) back the hard-right Confederation Party.

In South Korea (which has a sharply declining birth rate, now the lowest in the world), the gap is now a “yawning chasm”. It shows up in China and Tunisia too. Australia is moving in the same direction.

The 2022 Australian Electoral Study showed men were more likely to vote for the Coalition than women (38 per cent of men compared to 32 per cent of women). Women were more likely to vote for Labor and the Greens. “This represents a longer-term reversal of the gender gap in voter behaviour,” the 2022 study stated. “Since the 1990s women have shifted to the left and men to the right in their party preferences.”

Professor Ian McAllister, who is one of the co-leaders of the study, tells me Australian men “are marching off slightly to the right, but the main change is among women going off to the left, and particularly younger women”.

McAllister cites several reasons why women are lurching left. More women go to university now than previous generations, and more women go to university than men. University education is correlated with a progressive political lean.

Contemporary women are also more likely to work outside the home, making them concerned about workplace issues like salary equality and childcare – traditionally issues of the left.

They are also more likely than previously to be union members, even though union membership overall has declined.

Australia’s increasing secularity also has an effect. In the past, women were traditionally more religious, and religiosity tends to make people more politically conservative. Women are more likely to head a one-parent family, and such women tend to be more interested in health, education and social welfare, issues where parties of the centre-left have an advantage over the centre-right.

Julia Gillard’s prime ministership had an impact too. “About 10 per cent of the female vote swung to Labor,” says McAllister. “Once Julia Gillard stopped being PM, a lot of women drifted off to the centre-right but younger women stuck to Labor. There was a sustained after-effect.”

It is a long-forming social evolution that has blindsided the Liberal Party in particular. McCallister says both young men and young women are “completely different” from previous generations, in that they are not showing signs of getting more conservative as they age.

This could be the result of economic alienation – if you can’t afford a house, you are less likely to side with the conservative status quo. Like never before, young people’s politics is bound with their personal identity, and they have largely more progressive views on everything from same-sex marriage to racial inequality.

Crucially, these are not just political viewpoints to be acted on in the ballot box; they are deeply held personal convictions that can cause division at a personal and social level.

Even Esther Perel, the Belgian-American psychologist who has become a couples-counselling superstar through her podcast, Where Should We Begin?, says this is a major shift she has noticed in her lifetime of practice. She has put together a masterclass in managing personal conflict across ideological lines.

What this means for marriage and gender relations is anyone’s guess, but the trend isn’t shifting, so we will have ample opportunity to find out.

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