Why are young women increasingly left-wing?

And how it could change politics

There has been much commentary about boys and young men turning to the right. The surprise Netflix hit “Adolescence” set off another cascade of columns on the crisis of masculinity and the malign influence of Andrew Tate.

These worries are not unjustified. Some young men are attracted to misogynistic online content, and that can act as a gateway to the broader far right universe with the help of social media algorithms. It’s true that more boys struggle in the education system, that deindustrialisation has taken away the standard career paths for boys who get poor exam grades, and that it’s getting harder for men with low status jobs to find a partner.

But there has been much less written on a substantially bigger shift in voting behaviour amongst young women, who are moving leftwards fast (Gaby Hinsliff and Cas Mudde are honourable exceptions). John Burn-Murdoch highlighted the worldwide phenomenon of polarisation between the genders in younger age groups last year. It’s clear from his graphs that, in most countries, it’s driven more by women shifting left than men right (South Korea is a notable outlier). Yet it’s the men that have got most of the attention.

It's a phenomenon that’s continued in more recent elections. In the UK last year almost a quarter of 18-24 year old women voted Green (according to YouGov), and just 12% voted for any right-wing party. Since the election YouGov data suggests Reform’s support in this age group hasn’t risen – all the increase in their vote has come from older people – and that the Greens are doing a lot better.

In Germany, earlier this year, 34% of 18-24 year old women voted for Die Linke, driving the left-wing party’s dramatic resurgence and helping them get back into the Bundestag. In Spain, at last year’s European elections a poll found 59% of 25-30 year old women saying they’d vote left-wing. In Australia, according to a 2024 analysis, Gen Z women are by far the most left-wing voter segment.

Despite the focus on young men, the split in their vote between left and right is broadly stable over time in most countries. We are seeing a shift within the young male right-wing vote from traditional centre-right parties to radical right parties, but that’s something happening with men in every age group. Conversely young women are both genuinely shifting leftwards, and within the left-wing vote towards more radical parties like the Greens or Die Linke. This is not happening with older women where trends are either stable or where there’s a far less dramatic leftwards shift.

If this represents a long-term change it will have an increasingly significant impact on politics that is not reflected in current political discourse, which tends to focus on the concerns of older male voters. So in the rest of this post I’m going to look at how gender voting trends have changed over time, the reasons why this new shift leftwards might be happening, and the implications for politics over the coming decades.