men & women · 3 min
Are men and women really at war?
Young women have moved one way. Young men mostly haven’t moved at all. Is that a war — or a drift?
The attitude gap is real, and biggest among the young. The ‘war’ is mostly happening on your screen.
Our observer notices the strangest fight on the planet: the two halves of a species that must live together, raise children together and share every workplace — reported to be ‘at war’. The data shows something quieter and odder. Around the mid-2010s, in country after country, the attitudes of young women and young men stop moving together. Hers head left — on politics, feminism, what counts as fair. His mostly… stay put.
Here’s the honest layout: the three stories told about that fork, the researcher who thinks it’s mostly the phones, and what the numbers actually support.
What you're usually told
The backlash is the story
Feminists and much of the left
Girls grew up with #MeToo and watched rights they’d thought settled get contested — so they moved: in the US, the share of women aged 18 to 29 calling themselves liberal climbed to around 40%, from about 28% a decade earlier. Meanwhile an online manosphere monetises boys’ resentment and sells them a villain. The war is real, this camp says — it’s being waged on women, and the drift of young men toward Tate-flavoured politics is the proof.
Two sexes, two different problems
Richard Reeves and the data centrists
Girls didn’t just catch up at school; they went past. In 1972 American men took a 13-point lead in bachelor’s degrees; today women hold a lead about as large the other way, and girls out-graduate boys in every US state — a pattern repeated across the rich world. Add the fading of the old provider script and you get two genuine, different grievances: her anger at unfinished equality, his sense of a role that expired without a replacement. Not a war — a mismatch nobody designed.
The overshoot
Social conservatives and much of the online right
Institutions spent a decade treating masculinity itself as something to be managed — then acted shocked when boys logged off and listened to whoever didn’t. If school, university and the HR handbook read ordinary male traits as problems, this camp argues, young men’s drift away from them is rational exit, not radicalisation. Feminism won, kept campaigning anyway, and calling the result a ‘war on women’ misreads who feels shot at.
The contrarian read
The ‘it’s the phones, not a war’ read
Alice Evans (King’s College London) and the divergence researchers
The scholar writing the book on this — The Great Gender Divergence — points at the mid-2010s, when the sexes stopped sharing a media diet: smartphones sorted young men and women into separate feeds, separate influencers, separate grievances, while dating apps rewired how they meet. The offline data keeps failing to find the war: in Britain only 32% think there’s much tension between men and women, and 55% say the young have more in common than divides them. The divergence is real, this read insists — but it’s an attention-economy story, loudest exactly where outrage pays.
Our read
Most likely: not a war — a real drift, made mostly by young women moving, amplified online far beyond its offline size. Watch whether it hardens into votes, dating and marriage.
Our confidence: that the attitude gap is real and biggest among the young — high. That it amounts to a ‘gender war’ — low (≈25%). Surveys honestly read, not prophecy.
Start with what’s solid. The fork shows up in independent datasets across dozens of countries, and in most of the West it has a precise shape: young women moved, sharply — young men mostly didn’t. That asymmetry matters, because ‘young men are lurching to the far right’ is usually the weaker half of the claim. Underneath sit two material stories both camps get half-right: equality genuinely unfinished (pay, safety, who does the caring) — and boys genuinely falling behind (school, university, the first rung of work), with nobody owning the second problem until recently.
But ‘war’ overshoots what the ground shows. Most Britons see little tension between the sexes; majorities say the young share more than divides them; and the gaps on charged labels — ‘feminism’, ‘toxic masculinity’ — run far ahead of the gaps on concrete questions, where near-consensus holds. South Korea is the warning, not the norm: the one rich country where the divergence fully politicised — elections now split by sex, and the birth rate is the world’s lowest. So the honest scoreboard isn’t the shouting online; it’s whether voting, dating and family formation start to split. Mostly, so far, they haven’t.
- ≈55%Drift, then cooling — the gap stays cultural and online-loud; age, work and family keep pulling the sexes into the same rooms, and the temperature falls as the cohort settles.
- ≈25%Hardening — Korea-style: the divergence turns electoral, parties build identities on it, and dating, marriage and birth rates sag under the mutual suspicion.
- ≈20%Convergence — the economics ease, the platforms lose their grip or get tamed, and the fork closes the way most youth attitude gaps do: quietly, with age.
How sure are we?
Check the verbs in any ‘gender war’ headline. In most Western data it’s young women who moved (left, fast) while young men mostly stood still — ‘men lurching right’ is usually the weaker half of the claim. And gaps on labels run far ahead of gaps on substance: on concrete questions like equal pay, big majorities of both sexes still agree.
Where this comes from
- Gallup (2024) — U.S. Women Have Become More Liberal; Men Mostly Stable The shape of the fork: young women’s liberal identification surged toward 40%; men’s line barely moved.
- Richard Reeves / Brookings (2022) — Boys left behind: education gender gaps across the US The education flip behind the male malaise — girls ahead from school through university, in every US state and across rich countries.
- King’s College London / Ipsos (2024) — Emerging tensions? Masculinity and women’s equality The UK divide up close: 37% of men aged 16–29 call ‘toxic masculinity’ unhelpful, versus 19% of young women.
- King’s College London / Ipsos (2025) — Young men and women have more in common than divides them, say public The against-the-panic numbers: only 32% of Britons see much tension between the sexes; 55% say the young share more than divides them.
Go deeper — read the book
The calm, data-heavy case that boys and men are genuinely struggling — from an author explicit that women’s gains must be protected while we fix it.
The book that moved this argument from blame to evidence. If you read one on the male half of the story, it’s this.
Written with AI and editorially curated. Talescout always labels AI text (EU AI Act, Art. 50). Numbers are considered judgements, not measurements.