Why Women Have Become Much More Liberal Than Men - Daniel Cox

Daniel Cox is a researcher, pollster and Director of the Survey Center on American Life. Never before has the divide between left and right mirrored the split between men and women so closely. Women are increasingly leaning to the left, while young men are skewing towards the right. Daniel is the original analyser of this groundbreaking data and has a variety of explanations for exactly what we're seeing in the modern political world. Expect to learn why there is such an ideological divide between men and women, whether #MeToo had anything to do with this change, what roles abortion & LGTB campaigns play in this, whether conservative men are struggling to find a partner, the implications of the gender political divide on dating and much more... - 00:00 The Ideological Gap Between Young Men & Women 06:52 Why Young Women Have Moved to the Left 14:20 Downsides of the MeToo Movement 19:11 The Decline of Political Socialisation 24:15 Political Factors Affecting Young Women 33:00 Have Men Changed Their Political Leanings? 36:34 Male Support of Feminism & MeToo 45:19 Has Voting Behaviour Actually Changed? 56:44 How This Divide Impacts the Dating World 1:03:46 Young Men Are Checking Out 1:10:21 Declining Trends in Life Satisfaction 1:14:04 Should We Be Pessimistic About the Future? 1:19:47 Where to Find Daniel - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  You are in the thick of it right now. That article that you wrote at the start of the year caused quite the ruckus.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it did. And it's funny because this is some research we've been doing for, you know, over a year. And often it just takes a single op ed and people start paying attention.

• 0:21Chris Williamson?

  How would you categorize the last couple of months for you and the sort of fallout?

• 0:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, one of the really interesting things is people are debating just exactly the extent of the divide, the nature of it, what's going on. So you have a lot of pollsters like myself saying, hey, you know, this is kind of unprecedented, what we're seeing, young women becoming much more liberal. And demographically, we're seeing rapid changes when it comes to like LGBTQ identity, growing education divides between young men and young women. So there's a lot of things that are emerging or new. And the political divide is just one of those things. But there are the, the, the cold water throwers who, you know, largely political scientists who want to say, well, you know, hold on, let's, let's wait till we, you know, we can get some corroborating data.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  But the fact of the matter is actually there's a lot of corroborating data already from a lot of really reliable sources that suggest that something is going on. And we can, I think, debate the margins around how extreme is the divide? How far apart are young men and young women and on what issues? But I think we can safely say that something really big is happening.

• 1:33Chris Williamson?

  All right. So just how big is this ideological divide between young men and young women? What's happening?

• 1:40Speaker 01

  So according to the Gallup data, which is some of the, the research that we've been using, we conduct our own surveys at the Survey Center on American Life, but we also do look at a lot of different other polls from the Pew Research Center and places like Gallup that have really long and reliable, trustworthy trends. And so Gallup shows beginning around 2014, 2015, this, this emerging ideological divide with young women becoming significantly more liberal, around 42, 43% identifies liberal in the latest polls. And young men really haven't shifted all that much when it comes to their ideology. So there's a, you know, anywhere from a 12 to 14 point gap between them now.

• 2:20Chris Williamson?

  Right. You've got at no time in the past quarter century has there been such a rapid divergence between the views of young men and young women.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  Right. And, you know, as far as we know, this is something that will continue to shape the way these folks relate to each other in terms of their, you know, priorities when it comes to, you know, the politicians that they want to nominate and elect and the issues that they care about. One of the really significant divisions we see is actually over the issue of abortion. And while both young men and young women tend to lean pretty significantly pro-choice, when it comes to the priorities of that issue, we did a poll in 2022, right before the midterm elections, and 61% of young women said that abortion was a critical priority for them, but it was only like 30% of young men. So just in terms of what they care about and how much they care about it is really different.

• 3:17Chris Williamson?

  What is the age bracket for this? Because could this not just be the usual young people are more liberal effect? And we've got a bit of social media that's maybe kind of emphasizing or magnifying that and kind of that explains it?

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think when it comes to this stuff, there's a lot that's going on and a lot that's pretty complicated. So I think the social media actually plays a really significant role in all this. But the other thing is like, when it comes to the age gaps, one of the problems we have in polling is we're often talking about different age groups. So in the research that we do, we identify young people as 18 to 29, and we identify as young adults or young women or young men. But some polls will scoot that up to 18 to 34, which is again, you know, it's they're young, but also there's a pretty significant difference between comparing 18 to 34, 18 to 29 in terms of life experience and, you know, economically, people are just some different positions in their mid 20s versus their early

• 4:17Speaker 01

  30s. And so we do have this problem. Sometimes we're talking past each other and different pollsters handling things a little bit differently. And then journalists, when they rush to cover this stuff, Uh, not to mention podcasters, uh, they're trying to sort through, you know, a, a kind of confluence of, of different, uh, and sometimes contradictory information and, and it can be challenging to sort through.

• 4:38Chris Williamson?

  So is this different than just young people becoming more liberal? This is a, because young people have always been young people, like we have a, a regular supply of 15 year olds and 17 year olds and 20 year olds and such, but this is a marked difference from that.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, absolutely. So if you, we compared young people today versus young people a generation ago. So we're not comparing baby boomers and generation Z. We're not comparing generational cohorts. We're look actually looking at young people across time.

• 5:06Chris Williamson?

  Right. Do men and women live on different planets then? They just see the world in very different.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  Mars and Venus, you mean? Uh, I, I think in one way, one of the things that's really challenging, uh, and I think is contributing to this uh, kind of gender antagonism that we're seeing is that so much of the interactions we're seeing among young men and young women is occurring online, on social media, uh, on platforms that uh, it's really easy to, to be and deep, to be dehumanized and to dehumanize people to, uh, not proceed with a lot of, of caution or empathy, uh, not to, to, you know, take people seriously. And so I think that's a, a significant problem. One, one of the things that I wrote, uh, recently for this great organization called the American Institute for Boys and Men,

• 5:55Speaker 01

  uh, which Richard Reeves runs, uh, who's, who's great. I'm a huge fan. And, uh, one of the things I wrote for them is the decline in dating, uh, particularly among young men. We've seen a really precipitous decline in how often, uh, teenagers are, are dating, spending time, uh, having a boyfriend or girlfriend. Uh, and I think that's problematic, uh, in that you kind of learn how to engage with someone, uh, in, in a really difficult and, and situations that require a lot of nuance, a lot of understanding. Uh, again, a lot of empathy. So like successful relationships have all that and can be very fraught. And so it's helpful to have experiences earlier so that when you, you know, move into your, your twenties

• 6:40Speaker 01

  and you're out on your own. You have some experience to draw from when you're trying to engage and trying to date and navigating really difficult, complex romantic situations.

• 6:52Chris Williamson?

  Why have young women moved to the left then? What's the driving forces here?

• 6:57Speaker 01

  So I think there's some, there's not any one thing, of course. This is social science, so there's a number of factors that we might consider. But I think there's some obvious ones. When you look at just what's happening with the Me Too movement, I think that was pretty significant. We conducted a bunch of in-depth interviews among young women and young men after a dating survey that we conducted early last year. And one of the things we heard from these young women again and again was how formative that experience was, you know, growing up and sort of seeing this happen in real time.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  There, I think, was a source of like, we're in this together. This idea of kind of shared or linked fate that, you know, if this thing was happening to this person, it could happen to Me Too, right? That's Me Too. So that would be felt like there was something of a commonality of interests and concerns there. I think that was pretty critical. And then for young men, what was really interesting is a lot of them said like, well, this is not really about me. This is about celebrities or this is like the kind of malevolent dudes out there who are kind of, you know, awful and I have nothing to do with them. So as opposed to being kind of a structural concern, it became something that they kind

• 8:13Speaker 01

  of dismissed as something that has nothing to do with them.

• 8:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I loved the idea of linked fate. I'd never heard it before. You say two thirds of young women believe that in most or every way, what happens to women in the US will have a bearing on their own lives. It's this sort of like, it's like inbuilt sort of tribalism, but it's more emotional than tribalism.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's kind of a recognition that there are structures in society or institutions that regardless of your race or ethnicity or religion or your geography, that you will have to navigate these things, that you are treated differently in American society because you're a woman. And I'm going to throw a lot of polling at you, but this one I think is pretty interesting. So Gallup tracked the, how women and men felt about the position of women in society. Were they satisfied with the way women were treated? And over the last like 20 or so years. Roughly similar numbers of men and women said that, yeah, they were basically satisfied

• 9:13Speaker 01

  with how women were being treated. And then around 2016, 2017, women just plummeted. So they were like 61%, 16, 17. And then today, they're in the like the mid 40s. So they're far less happy today about the way women are being treated in American society, which is a significant disruption from the past.

• 9:35Chris Williamson?

  Despite the fact that you've got rising socio-economic success for women, improvements in education, graduation from university, two women for every one man completing a four-year US college degree. Women earn 1,111 pounds more between the ages of 21 and 29 on average than men do, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it seems like that has to be, at least in part, something memetic or something sort of cultural, sort of like social psychology that's going on. Because at least in many of the ways that you can frame the reality of their experience, it is improving.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think undoubtedly, you can't look objectively at whether it's economic data or data about politics, or just understand the way the culture has evolved and how we treat issues like sexual harassment and discrimination, and not think that things are better for women than they were, you know, in the 1970s. But interestingly, some sociologists have actually looked at the way young women felt in the 70s versus today in terms of how much gender discrimination was a problem and how much they experienced it. And actually, women today feel like they have things worse. So some of this, I think, is about like understanding of, okay, what behavior do I categorize as a sexual harassment? And how

• 10:53Speaker 01

  am I feeling about various types of these kind of infractions? So if, you know, if a male coworker asks me out three times, is that, if he does it politely, politely and respectfully, is that, is that sexual harassment? How do we define those kinds of interactions? And I think in the past, you know, a lot of that stuff was kind of dismissed. And again, like, some of it was not good. A lot of it was not good and roundly criticized and, you know, should have been changed a long time ago.

• 11:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, right.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  But but some of it is now, you know, we're sort of judging, I think, societally as smaller infractions are sort of treated the same as really significant infractions and behavior.

• 11:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Do you know what the Tocqueville paradox is?

• 11:39Speaker 01

  I've not heard it.

• 11:40Chris Williamson?

  Cool idea. So as living standards in a society rise, people's expectations rise along with them. But when you start yourself off on that trajectory, the problem is reality has to at some point like asymptote out, like it can't continue to just get infinitely better. But your expectations can, and it's this sort of comparison between the two. Also, when you combine the Tocqueville paradox with concept creep, you know, the ever broadening of what might be considered to be racism, or what might be considered to be sexism, or what might be considered to be harassment. Again, not saying that these things don't exist, but I think that most sane people would agree that there has been a hypersensitization to things that previously probably wouldn't have even appeared on the radar.

• 12:25Chris Williamson?

  Maybe they should have done, but a lot of the things that were occurring before have been gotten rid of, and much of the stuff which is happening now seems to be

• 12:36Chris Williamson?

  at the very least magnifying small things into big things.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and of course, I mean, I want to be very sensitive and careful about how we talk about this stuff. But I think that's absolutely right. And in terms of, you know, what you've seen some, we've seen some conservative but feminists talk about this issue and then say it's it's kind of stripping agency away from women to sort of say, hey, you know, we can't handle this, or, you know, we don't know how to navigate these situations or right like. And again, if the behavior is really, you know, bad, heinous, there should be, you know, legal, moral, ethical red lines for all that stuff. And there should be a zero tolerance policy. But I think a lot of this stuff falls in a gray area.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  And so how we treat it like culturally and socially is pretty important.

• 13:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, and it's open, it's open to debate as well, right?

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, absolutely. And a lot of this stuff is based on perception. So how did I perceive this, the interaction? How does, how did I think this person was oriented towards me? And what were their, what was their intent? But the other thing, and I think this is something that is missed in all this discussion, which again, I'm generally sympathetic to the fact that we aren't as nuanced when we talk about this stuff as we should be. But there's a rising rate of sexual harassment that's actually occurring online. So the Pew Research Center looked at over like a five year period and found that a range of behaviors that young women are far more likely to be. Uh, experienced some type of sexual harassment and they defined a bunch of different types of behaviors. And so in that way, uh, it is increasing, right? That that is a difference.

• 14:16Chris Williamson?

  That's a good, that's a good point that I hadn't considered that uh, technology has enabled new types of sexual harassment. Unsolicited dick pics, people sending sort of uh, rude unwanted messages, stalking, harassment online, that sort of stuff. That's, that's something that I hadn't considered. That being said, um, the toxic male gaze, if you look at somebody who, if you look at a woman on the tube for longer than five seconds, that constitutes something that they should be concerned about. Um, workplace culture being incredibly sort of anti uh, collaborative, I think. And what it feels like, you know, I'm, I'm not in an office, but what it feels like from at least friends that work there. Um, their felt senses that trepidation, that they're, they're in a lot of fear.

• 14:59Chris Williamson?

  And that is going to come across as kind of like cold to a lot of women, that they actually want to be able to collaborate with their male counterparts. Some really interesting research that suggests that post me to uh, male supervisors were less likely to collaborate with female graduates. Because they were scared that something downstream from that was going to get them in trouble, even if they didn't have any intention of doing that. So I, I do think that we need to be careful about what we make people expect. One of the other quotes that I thought was really interesting, he said, look at this is from a, a 21 year old woman. Luckily I had all that over social media to shape the way I look at dating and men. She said it allowed her to use other people's experiences to form a sense of putting a guard up.

• 15:43Chris Williamson?

  A 20 year old woman offered a similar take that me too empowered her to stand up for herself. I think it makes me less of a doormat. Again, female agency, taking control, independence, all that stuff. Very, very good. But it allowed her to use other people's experiences to form a sense of putting a guard up. I'm not convinced that putting a guard up based on other people's experiences, especially if it's a guy glancing over in the gym. Or, you know, like some social media campaign that kind of maybe makes mountains out of molehills. I'm not convinced that that forms uh, robust psychologically healthy women. I think that that makes them hypervigilant, scared of lots of men, always on edge, and that can't be good for them either.

• 16:26Chris Williamson?

  That, that's not the sort of uh, environment I want for women to inhabit from other women.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think one of the problems is, and we could talk about this a lot, is taking so many of our cues from social media, right? Versus our own personal experience and the people that we know. Cause you'll often hear this kind of divergence where in the research that we've done, women will say, yeah, you know, the people, the men in my life, you know, siblings, cousins, friends are all great, but I think overall men are kind of terrible. And well, where are you getting that perspective from? Cause your real world experience is actually telling you a very different story. But well, I'm seeing these terrible men online and well, what do you kind of, you know, what do you think the algorithm is doing? Is it, is it putting, you know, the kind of boring, polite, respectful men?

• 17:16Speaker 01

  Are you think they're overrepresented on social media? Of course not. It's like the worst examples of all these different categories of offenses.

• 17:24Chris Williamson?

  The most egregious stories are always the ones that catch fire. And the problem is if you spend most of your time and learn about the world through the internet, you get a disproportionate view. You get a biased view toward crazy stories. You know, the guy leaves the house and comes back to find his wife in bed with the postman like, you know, that story catches fire because it's so, oh my God, like, could you believe that this thing happened? The same thing goes for, and it makes everybody model the behavior of others on the worst examples.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  Exactly. And there are, there are folks out there, entrepreneurs who actually are pushing this stuff too. So it's not just that the algorithm is finding this stuff and pushing it in front of you. There are people out there who, you know, they, they built their business or their brand on doing this stuff.

• 18:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. There's also not enough female leadership in the eyes of women.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I think they're on both sides. And one of the things that I've really tried to do is sort of say, well, we, we actually need more, more conversations and opportunities for, for young people to engage with one, one another. So one of the things I've been, you know, Consistently concerned about is the decline in sociability among young people. So the pandemic was a real big hit. But even before then, we saw a really significant decline in just how often teenagers hung out with each other. And maybe, you know, drank alcohol or smoked or whatever, but just kind of did something, you know, out beyond parental supervision on their own and, you know, behave like we would traditionally expect teenagers to behave.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  And maybe get into some trouble, but also have opportunities to form bonds and engage with each other socially and learn from each other.

• 19:11Chris Williamson?

  Why is political socialization not in effect here? Why aren't Republican parents giving birth to Republican young women?

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is something that we found in our data as well in a 2023 study. So we looked at, it was focused on Gen Z, but we also wanted to look at their formative experiences. So what was the educational background of their parents? What was the religious background? What was the politics of their parents? And one of the things that we see that is consistent with a lot of political science research is that parental politics does influence the politics of children, particularly when there's consistency within the household. So when both parents in two-parent households are Democrats or both are Republicans, they fairly effectively can pass on political values to the next generation.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  There's lots of caveats and there's a rich socialization literature that deals with all this and then talks about how this all works. But one of the things that we saw was that while Republican parents tend to raise Republican sons, they're far less likely to raise Republican daughters. So only 44% of women raised by Republican parents still identify as an adult as a Republican.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  And that's pretty significant because every other configuration that we looked at, we saw the political socialization was proceeding fairly consistently. And this was the kind of anomalous case. And for me, you know, I speculate in the piece that I wrote about this. Well, at least some of it has to do with Donald Trump. I think some of it has to do with the rise in LGBTQ identity that a lot of young women who identify this way, and in large surveys, it's one in three young women. So it's we're not. I'm sure it's that number because I've seen that sort of bandied around. Have you stress test that at all? You see it in, I think Gallup has numbers that are close to that. In our large national surveys that we conduct with Ipsos, we see that number.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  So I think there's another polling organization called PRI who has that number. So we've seen it pretty consistently, asked a couple of different ways. And so I think we have some confidence that at least what the questions are asking, do you identify as, you know, lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, whatever? That, that at least, you know, we are seeing, you know, positive increased identity from. But, but I think like when it comes to what that means in terms of sexual behavior and sexual preferences, there, there's some separation there. And some folks, and I would count myself in this category. I think that at least there's, there's some politics involved in all this.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  So if you look at, for instance, that the number of people who identify as bisexual, that is the, the fastest increasing category, bisexual. But if you look at the, the sexual preferences and behavior of people who identify as bisexual, there's, there's some distance there. There's some. Oh, so people identify as bisexual, but still date heterosexually most. Yes, much more, right? So, so that, so that there is some. Where's that come from? Is that polling data as well? So, yeah, this is, this is polling data. And again, I think there's some fluidity in all this. We're talking about young people. So again, things may, may change over time. Things take some. Things may change week to week. Sort out, yeah.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  And, and I think that that's right, that this generation is, has been given the space to kind of explore and find out. And that's, that's all good. But I think that it does mean that we need to exercise some caution when we're thinking about, whoa, okay, you know, there's one in three. Young women are LGBTQ, but what does that mean? And might that be subject to change at some point? I think it might.

• 22:58Chris Williamson?

  An identification with the movement overall. But when the rubber meets the road, things don't change that much. Just to kind of round out what you were talking there. Forty four percent of women raised by Republican parents identify as Republican. But 77% of women with Democrat parents identify as Democrats. And you're right, political socialization is a thing. But just your behavioral genetics gives a big predisposition here. You know, your political affiliation is at least in part genetically predisposed because you have certain values about the way that you see the world that are just like imbued into the mechanisms of your brain and so on and so forth.

• 23:43Chris Williamson?

  And then you layer on top the socialization piece. So to go 44% of women raised by Republican parents identify as Republican themselves. So it's more likely for you to be a Democrat female, young girl with Republican parents than for you to follow the political socialization of your family plus the sort of genetic predisposition.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Some of those folks are probably like politically independent too. So it's not just Republican Democrats.

• 24:10Chris Williamson?

  It's not.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  But yeah, yeah, I mean, the point, the point still stands.

• 24:15Chris Williamson?

  What role is abortion playing here?

• 24:20Speaker 01

  I think it's pretty huge. I know there's been, you know, I feel like there's a pendulum swinging in terms of, you know, one week we say abortion is gonna, you know, totally reconfigure the political landscape in the US with the overturn of Roe and the Dobbs decision. The next week, well, you know, we're not seeing in this polling data and, you know, we're not seeing this huge jump in or spike in turnout among young women. And so I think, I feel like it's vacillated in terms of how critical we think this is, both sort of in the immediate political context and sort of longer term. I tend to think that it's it's pretty crucial because it's it's occurring when it did for this

• 25:04Speaker 01

  this generation that is always kind of predisposed to be very, very supportive. If you look at generation earlier among millennials, actually, they tended to be surprisingly conservative on abortion. And I don't think political scientists ever really sussed out why that was. Because at the time, the millennial generation, so you look back in, you know, the mid 2000s forward and and that generation was the most educated at that time, the least religious. There was a number of of policy positions they were pretty liberal on, like gay marriage. And so you would think that this, the abortion issue, they would also be, tend to be pretty pro-choice, but they were not. But that's not true for Generation Z, the the generation that followed millennials.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  And for that generation, they're incredibly liberal on abortion. So you combine a a Supreme Court ruling that was not popular among that generation, an issue that's incredibly salient for young women and typically always is, and an issue that they tend to care a lot about. And then I think like that, that to me suggests that moving ahead, you know, it's going to be a pretty significant factor in orienting their politics and motivating them.

• 26:13Chris Williamson?

  You just mentioned higher education. It seems to be a trend that people who are more highly educated, educated end up being more liberal. Is the increasing female participation in higher education contributing to this too?

• 26:27Speaker 01

  I think so. I I am not one of those folks who who believes that, you know, higher ed is, has a huge impact on the political trajectory of young people. I think there's a lot of self-selection that goes into people who go to college. I think there's a lot of differences across different types of campuses. If you're going to a school, you know, in the South versus the Northeast or the West. I mean, there's a, there's a lot of factors. The other thing I thought, I always kind of chuckle at is when people sort of saying, oh, you know, professors are turning people into Marxists and atheists. And the professors that I know says that we can't even get these kids to read a damn syllabus.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  And so like, they think that they have, you know, all this power over the the politics of their students. What I think What's going on there is probably that for a lot of these campuses, that the peer environment is exercising a pretty significant influence. And so your your peers' politics, and then also the the longer trajectory in terms of where you end up. So if you go to college, you're more likely to end up in a city, possibly a coastal city that and then among you'll work in places with lots of other college educated folks. And because of education polarization, we're seeing that you know, you're you're more likely to be around people who share your, you know, centrist, so left leaning political views.

• 27:48Chris Williamson?

  That's a really good point. I want to just sit in that for another moment because there is a a big demonization about the structure of the universities overall. It's either they're the ones that are woking the students and that all of the rest of it. But when you consider that, I mean, I think back to my university educate, I did five years, two degrees, and I spent like 2% of my day in lectures. And most of the time that I was in lectures, I was talking to my friends in any case, and all the rest of the time, it was just the melting pot of the student community. So really, when you're pointing the finger, I think that a lot of it should be what what happens when you get lots of

• 28:28Chris Williamson?

  young people with social media and trends in a cosmopolitan city that's probably coastal, at least maybe maybe coastal, but big cosmopolitan city. What do they talk about? And how do they? How does the discourse self reinforce? How can it sort of run away with itself? That's, that's a fantastic point. That's a really, really interesting point I hadn't thought of.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then stuff, there's a reinforcing effect, right, too, with our polarized media environment in the United States. Like, so you you don't even have to leave your bubble. And so if you have, you know, your best friends and your immediate social group is all left left leaning folks, they're citing opinion writers that are left leaning and, you know, MSNBC anchors. And so like you, you can live quite happily in this bubble, both in your immediate environment and then your larger information environment, too.

• 29:22Chris Williamson?

  I wonder how conflicting this is for young women. I wonder if we know how

• 29:34Chris Williamson?

  The hypersensitivity that young women have to the trends of the social group around them, very, very tuned up. I don't imagine this is particularly enjoyable for young women to, you know, maybe they've got one opinion that sits outside, maybe they're slightly different on the First Amendment, or maybe they're not too sure on immigration, or maybe they're not too sure on whatever, you know, anything else. I feel, I feel bad for them. I feel bad for the fact that there is a huge sort of wave that's moving through. And I think anybody who, the purity spiral is very sort of pure. And anyone who doesn't adhere, it's, it's, it's going to feel uncomfortable. There'll be discordance. I imagine this probably

• 30:18Chris Williamson?

  doesn't make them psychologically feel all that sort of safe or robust, or able to be open and honest and truly sort of speak their opinions.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think too, right? Like, we know in political science that having, being surrounded by people who share your political views is actually not great from a sort of larger political system perspective, because those folks tend to have more extreme attitudes, right? That being constantly having your views affirmed by those around you, it's easier to demonize, it's easier to engage in kind of a tribal politics. So that's-

• 30:55Chris Williamson?

  You never get any counterpoints that are said in good faith.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Right. And I think the other thing too is like, I don't think we properly appreciate that so much of this stuff is an evolution, right? We, we kind of learn, we try out ideas, we try out language. And I think we ought to give space for that. So I think like, one of the things, like, I'm not a huge believer in the, in the cancel culture conversation. I think that, you know, in certain instances, yes, you know, we have been too restrictive. Certain institutions have played roles that I think are counterproductive in terms of having an honest, open debate. I think sometimes it's overblown, but I think there, there is one way that I think like, the entire way we engage in political discourse in this country is problematic. And that is like, we think that, that nothing will ever change,

• 31:43Speaker 01

  that people don't change in terms of their views on, on various issues. And of course, that's not true. And one of the quickest ways for you to change your opinion is I drop you in a different political context and you'll change your views pretty quickly, or at least you you will reflect on what you believe.

• 32:00Chris Williamson?

  Oh, these people aren't the enemy. They're not necessarily demonized.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Right. And and I think that's one of the problems when you get to to the the political influence of dating and relationships is you sort of say, well, I'm only going to date, you know, a Trump supporter, or I would never date a Trump supporter. I I think like one of the the problems with social media and dating apps is it allows you to more effectively filter out things that you think you might not like. But we are pretty terrible judges on the things that we actually care about in in many respects. I tell this to my to my son when he's he's, you know, turning his his nose up at food or dinner is like, you've never tried this, so you have no idea. And so like, the experiment and experience are actually a part of growing up.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  And I think to the extent that politics is a part of that, we ought to give people space. We ought to give them, you know, some empathy and understanding when they're working through things. And I think we're just so quick to judge and bash, and it's it's really unfortunate.

• 32:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Can you try and explain? So we've spoken about young women. I want to talk about young men.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:05Chris Williamson?

  But how much? How much is it young women moving to the left? And how much is it young men moving to the right? Is it equal amounts from wherever the set point is? Or is it more left and men are a little bit more right? How would you categorize that?

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is the hard part about this is it's not really clear what's going on in men. There's sort of different stories and narratives emerging from different polls. So the same Gallup survey that I I quoted earlier with women becoming more liberal by about 12 to 14 points over the last, you know, seven, eight years, that men seem pretty flat in that in terms of their ideological disposition. A plurality are moderate. And yes, I think similar numbers are liberal and conservative. There's some sense that they are becoming a little bit more Republican.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Or more predisposed to to support Republican candidates.

• 33:54Chris Williamson?

  Is that, sorry, is that is that different to being conservative?

• 33:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so political ideology and partisan affiliation are different. You know, the most of the way that survey research focuses on this and asks about this is that there's a Democrat, Republican, Independent is your political affiliation. And there's for ideology, there's conservative, moderate, liberal. They are correlated. So if you're a liberal, you're likely to be Democrat. If you're conservative, you're likely to be Republican. But one of the challenges is that for this younger generation, they tend to have increasingly negative views of both parties. So even people who are quite liberal said, I don't like Biden. I don't like the Democrats. And this is actually particularly true of young men.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  I think it's like close to four in 10 view both political parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party unfavorably. And so you have this weird thing like there's more people identifying as independent, even as the country is moving a little bit to more to the left. So we're becoming more independent and slightly more liberal. And so it's complicated when we try to make sense of what's going on. And I think too often we correlate those things and it's actually there's some there's some daylight between them that we need to appreciate.

• 35:10Chris Williamson?

  That was one of the most interesting things that I learned in your article, which was young men are far less likely than women to say that any issue is personally important to them. It seems like if there was a checked out of politics, like dimension to this, that that would be the real skew for men.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think for a lot of you men, like I think this is kind of an orientation that has happened because of how rapidly some of the social norms and culture has changed. And there's a real sense of dislocation, like where do I fit? What I'm told to be an ally, but how do I be an ally? Can I advocate for myself even or the things that I care about? And so you see this, this, you know, in a large number of young men, kind of this, this political disaffection of I just like, I'm, I'm kind of tuned out. I'm done with it. And I think one of the things we're seeing is that the Republican Party has actually probably done a little bit better job of reaching out and saying that they are concerned about

• 36:17Speaker 01

  the issues that young men are facing, whereas liberals and Democrats a little bit less so. And so you've, you've we're perhaps seeing a little bit of polarization around just the way the parties are engaging on issues around gender.

• 36:31Chris Williamson?

  Right, yeah, that makes sense. What about men's opinion on feminism and Me Too and stuff like that? Is this a, in part, could this be a reaction to them feeling like those have gone too far?

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think you see this in the polling data. So whether it's the Pew Research Center showing a 20-point gap in support of the Me Too movement between young men and young women.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Young men are kind of divided and young women are overwhelmingly supportive of Me Too. And then in our data, we said, we asked a question about whether people identify as a feminist. Young women largely likely to identify as feminists, but it's only like 40% of young men. So you, you do have a pretty significant gender gap. And on the question of feminism, actually, the gender gap is largest among Gen Z than any other generation. So there's more disagreement about feminist identity and what feminism is.

• 37:18Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, a 2022 survey by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that 46% of Democrat men under 50 agreed that feminism has done more harm than good, and even more Republican men agreed. So, you know, it's not like Democrat men and Republican men are just one bundle of ideology. Like, people have different wings within that. But, you know, nearly 50% of Democrat men under 50 saying that they think that feminism has gone too far, I think.

• 37:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I can see why if men do feel dislocated and displaced and uncertain about their position, and then they don't feel like they're being given the sympathy or the support that perhaps they would, that they're going to start pointing the finger around.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  And then, as you know, we've seen, you know, various scholars have started looking into this, there's in many ways, young men are struggling economically in education, and they have, you know, particular needs that are not being met, they have problems that people aren't advocating for, solutions. And so I think that plays into all this. And I think we're really, really bad at trying to hold these two different ideas in our hands at the same time, that there's been progress in terms of gender equality, but there's still, you know, plenty of places where women face structural disadvantages.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  And then there's increasingly problems that young men are facing that are unique to young men, that societally, we would be, you know, would be in our interest to try to address. And both those things can be true, right?

• 39:02Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  Both those things can be true.

• 39:04Chris Williamson?

  Yes. An oft cited statistic that conveys the enduring absurdity of the gender gap is that until very recently, there were more CEOs named John than CEOs who were women. Across most industries, from politics to academia, men in American society still control more resources, earn higher wages, and enjoy more prestige. But few young men have any experience in the boardroom, and in the classroom, it's their female peers who are crushing it. And Christine Ember wrote this phenomenal article last year, where she said, young men feel like their problems are being dismissed out of hand as whining from a patriarchy that they no longer feel a part of. It's this sort of use of outlier male success, I think, a lot of the time, that kind of legitimates some of the, what are you crying

• 39:46Chris Williamson?

  about? Look at the number of CEOs. And it's like, yeah, but look at the number of men at the lower end of the distribution as well. They don't feel like they've got the same kind of sympathy. And again, like, what does this lead to? It just leads to this sort of finger pointing, this tribal purity spiral. And the thing that came to mind when reading this part of your research was that it's like a zero sum view of gender equality on both sides.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is increasingly where we're headed, right? That on either side, if you if you help women, you're hurting men. If you're helping men, you're not paying attention to the

• 40:27Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I did an episode, I must have done, I don't know, forty episodes that is something along the lines of what's happening to young men, how are young men struggling, how male mental health, male loneliness, blah, blah, blah. I did one episode a couple of weeks ago. I've done many episodes about women, but I did one in particular. That was the first one in a little while with Freya India, this great writer. Jonathan Haidt's a massive fan.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know her.

• 40:51Chris Williamson?

  Phenomenal, phenomenal writer.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  No, I don't know her personally.

• 40:54Chris Williamson?

  I did an episode with her and it was like, why are Gen Z women struggling so much? And immediately so many of the comments were to do with like, oh, this is pandering. This is like feminism's gone too far. You know, it's men that are struggling. I'm like, dude, like there is a library of, and what it made me think was like,

• 41:15Chris Williamson?

  it's really easy to point the finger and say, you know, look at how many benefits women are getting and they're the ones that are doing well in education and employment. And the men are the guys that are being held behind and no one really cares. It's like, yeah. And then as soon as you say, also, women are struggling. Also, there's a lot of problems that they're facing, especially when it comes to mental health. Like, Jesus Christ. And again, zero sum view of empathy. Like, we can't have, if we give empathy to someone that isn't me or my tribe, then it's taking it away. And it's like, the, all that that can lead to is dissatisfaction and people not being able to understand each other. Like, it's just going to make the situation worse.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think it's really interesting that you use the word tribal when we're talking about men and women, because I feel like we talk about tribal politics. We talk about race and religion, talk about class, we talk about Republicans and Democrats. But typically, we don't talk about as much men and women inhabiting their, you know, oppositional tribes. But I think that's exactly what's happening, kind of embedded by social media and the lack of socialization. And I think like, that's going to be a pretty profound civilization, civilizational problem.

• 42:31Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 42:33Chris Williamson?

  How could you be wrong about this data? In what ways might you be wrong?

• 42:38Speaker 01

  A million ways. There, I mean, in any, any work that we do, one of the things we try and one of the first things, whenever I see some kind of interesting or seemingly anomalous finding is like, where is this corroborated? How can we see where, where this stacks up compared to what we know? And so, looking at a lot of different trusted data sets, conducting high quality, reliable research ourselves is, is a priority for us and being transparent. So on our website, the surveys that are on American life, you can download all our data. And one of the great things about that is it keeps you really honest if you think that people are going to be poking around your stuff. And so I think that is incredibly important to institutionally.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  But when it, when it comes to, to where things might end up, I think there's, you know, I'm writing a book on this topic, but I think the divide that I'm looking at, which is not just political but relational, I think we, this is solvable. So the, the trajectory that I, I currently am forecasting that I'm seeing in this data may not wind up as bad as I may talk about it.

• 43:44Chris Williamson?

  May sort of come back into land in a bit more of a-

• 43:46Speaker 01

  In 2024, right. You know, we, we are seeing divisions over marriage with young women saying that, you know, marriage benefits men more than women. So we're seeing declining interest in parenthood, plummeting rates of civic participation. And so all these things are kind of pointing in a, in a negative direction, could, could change pretty significantly. One of the ways in which I was actually somewhat feeling rather positive about the pandemic, one of the only ways and, and optimistic is that I thought that it would-

• 44:23Speaker 01

  In this generation and among people generally, kind of develop an appreciation for the importance of of social ability, right? The importance of hanging out and being with each other in community, whether it's a religious community, whether it's, you know, being part of membership organizations, whether it's, you know, just going to work out with friends or play board games, that when that was taken away from us, I think a lot of people suffered in a lot of different ways. And, you know, my hope would be that this this generation, particularly the teenagers and young people who really suffered through it, we know those those folks suffered, tend to suffer more than others, would develop an understanding of we really need to prioritize this. We need to find spaces where we can

• 45:08Speaker 01

  spend time with each other. I think the verdict is still out on that one. I'm hoping that that's that's what will happen, but I'm not 100% positive that that it will.

• 45:18Chris Williamson?

  Rose Horowitz wrote an article titled, Are Gen Z Men and Women Really Drifting Apart? The Much-Theorized Political Rift Has Yet To Show Up In Actual Voting Behavior. What's your thoughts on that?

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Well, she's wrong on that. I talked to I talked to Rose for that article, and she's not the only one. So what's happened is there's a number of political scientists who've come out and sort of say, well, in these academic data sets, the general social survey, the American National Election Study, the Congressional Election Study, like, we don't see this stuff replicated. But point of fact, the only data set where you really don't see it, that you have a large enough sample, is the CES. And in the rest of them, in the Pew Research Trend Data, you see it, and Gallup, you see it. There's Moderating the Future data that folks have looked at, and you see it in there. You even see it

• 46:12Speaker 01

  in incoming freshmen, UCLA does an ongoing study and looks at the politics of incoming freshmen, and you see a growing gender divide there. So there's a lot of corroboration in terms of the data. And then you see it in exit poll data, right? That there's, I think, like a 12-point gap in the voting behavior of young women and young men in exit polls, and you see it in voter file data as well. So I think it's, we should proceed cautiously. And I think that, I think what some of the political scientists are subjected to, which I think is absolutely valid, is to say, Well, what do people mean when they're identifying as liberal? Does that mean that they're liberal and supportive of, you know,

• 46:54Speaker 01

  the progressive position on all these different issues from gun control to climate change to abortion? Because point of fact, like, young men today are significantly to the left of older men on a lot of those questions, particularly when it comes to to race, because the the the generation is much more racially diverse. Right? So you do see them to the left, but but relative to where young women are, I think there's still a lot of evidence that suggests that they're they're they're in a little bit different place. The other thing, too, is it's not just politics. You look at views of like pornography. There's a really significant difference where young men and young women are.

• 47:32Chris Williamson?

  What do they say there?

• 47:34Speaker 01

  So we we asked this question about whether there should be more restrictions placed on internet pornography. There's like a 20-point gap in the view of young men and young women. Young women want it much more restricted, young men don't, not shockingly, I think. So there's there's a lot of those kind of cultural questions where you see these divides show up as well. And then, like, concern about climate change, concern about gun control, young women, again, show up much, much higher.

• 48:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, Gallup just did their own analysis as well, right? I think I saw you.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  It was the same data, but they just published it finally. So like, I I published it in 2022. Then I I did this op-ed earlier this year, based on the Subsec article. And then Gallup, a couple of weeks later, published their, it's the same data, though.

• 48:19Chris Williamson?

  Right, right, I understand, yeah. It's a, and just to kind of round out the stress testing of your data here. How? How, you said around about 2014 was when this really began to kick in?

• 48:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, 2014, 2015, depending on what data you're looking at.

• 48:36Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so we're now at, you know, a decade, approaching a decade, where this has been sort of trending. So this isn't the same kind of flash in the pan. For instance, for a while, quite a while, I was citing this stat. The number of men between 18 and 30 that report not having sex in the last year has tripled from 2008 to 2018, from 8% to 28%. And I was like, trotting this stat out, that was GSS data. Then I didn't realize that new GSS data had come out twice. It had come out once and then the second one was what made me realize that the first one had come out. And that trend had reversed. And I was like, right, okay, like that. And if you actually look at, it was such a sharp increase of such a short space of time

• 49:19Chris Williamson?

  that now plotted across enough time, it actually just looks like, yeah, what happened here? Maybe it was something to do with the way that this data was captured. Maybe it was something about 2018, I don't know. But that seems to have come back down now. And actually, women switched over with men, I think, 2019, 2020. Women did perhaps a hyper vigilance around sort of like pathogen disgust response type thing around about the pandemic that could have been a part of it. But it seems like the trend that you are talking about here is more robust longitudinally.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think if you're, it's not just in response to, I think, specific events. Like when we look at, you know, and when posters look at, you know, what kind of impact is a particular, even in an important national event. So, you know, the, some of the protests over police shootings of African American men, right? And we sort of say, okay, how does this change attitudes towards police and policing? You did see a significant impact of that, but then it dissipated pretty quickly. And so I think some of that is like, that almost always happens, right? You, you know, for events to have really profound changes in our political trajectory,

• 50:36Speaker 01

  they, you know, they have to be, you know, of a magnitude that we don't typically see. But what we're seeing, I think, young women is not just a reaction to the election of Donald Trump, to the Dobbs decision or to me too. I think it's partly demographic. So you look at their educational attainment. It's significantly more educated than men. If we're seeing education polarization, we would expect that to show up in their politics. Rise of LGBTQ identity, again, that's increased over the last, you know, six, seven, eight years dramatically. And that group, LGBTQ people are much more liberal than people who identify as straight or heterosexual.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  So like, there are some demographic reasons to expect that, you know, we would see this, this growing division in, in, in politics.

• 51:26Chris Williamson?

  What's happening with race?

• 51:29Speaker 01

  So race is really challenging to get at in this cohort because simply in a lot of the survey data we have, we don't have large enough samples to break out. So, you know, in terms of your average survey of 1,000 people, you have basically maybe, you know, 120 people who are black or African American. And so you can't do a lot in terms of the analysis. Now, some of the data we have is much larger, but still you're pretty limited in what you can do. But a lot of the divisions we're seeing comes across racial categories. So we see between, you know, black men and black women, pretty significantly different. In fact, I just published a piece that looked at the way there's been a really significant

• 52:13Speaker 01

  drop off in terms of democratic identity among black men, but not black women. And this is again, based on some of that Gallup data. So I think that that makes sense in terms of, well, okay, look at the rates of religious participation among black Americans. That has historically tied them to the Democratic Party. So more religious black Americans tended to be more Democratic. So as we see, we're seeing black men drop out of church at much higher rates than black women, you know, we would, we might expect that this to have an impact on their downstream affiliation.

• 52:51Chris Williamson?

  What does this mean for the 2024 election cycle?

• 52:57Speaker 01

  That's probably the hardest thing to predict because I think despite the fact that we've seen this divergence, I think we're gonna see, you know, some significant amount of support for young people. One of the challenges is that, I don't know if you've been tracking polls when it comes to the youth vote this year, but they've been all over the place. There's been some reliable polls that say, you know, Trump is up with young people, which would be an absolute, absolutely unprecedented shift. You know, of like basically 20 points to what what happened in in 2020. So I think we're going to see significant support for Biden among young people overall. I think it's going to be significantly higher among young women. I think that that Biden campaign, they are ready, but I think they're going to continue to make abortion

• 53:42Speaker 01

  a really significant part of their campaign outreach to to young women. I don't know what they're going to do for young men. One of the things that I thought was pretty interesting, and I don't know if you've had reason to to go over to the Democrat's webpage to sort of check it out. Well, I was there recently just to look at the the groups that they were advocating for, right? So these are the they have like, these are the groups that Democrats are fighting for. There's like 16 of them, I think. Women, Native Americans, Hispanics, African Americans, other ethnic groups, rural people, urban people, women, the one group that was missing, men.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  So it it it almost seems that it's such an oversight that it has to be intentional. I don't I don't.

• 54:35Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  And so I think

• 54:39Speaker 01

  to the extent that we see this this divide occurring, I think that that the parties are going to play a role in in orienting and and reaching out to folks and to the extent that the Democratic Party does not, you know, actively appeal to men, and particularly young men, I think they're they're going to continue to to slide right.

• 54:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I wonder, one thing that you you said earlier on was how formative Me Too and then I guess the the Me Too of 2023, which was the abortion ruling. I wonder whether that is formative to young people during their life, but that if there wasn't a similar incident in six years' time or whatever, that that's kind of baked into the system and that this is almost like a quite prolonged, but a response to those kind of situations. And whether or not, without continuing to sustain that with more and more

• 55:40Chris Williamson?

  what is perceived as an egregious transgression of somebody's freedom or or like an important cultural moment, I wonder whether.

• 55:50Chris Williamson?

  I wonder how much of what we're seeing is still the blast radius of some big events. And I wonder how much is more sort of deep rooted and deep seated. You know what I mean?

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I've kind of struggled with this myself. And I think I've evolved in the way I think about it. Like, I think at one point, I thought, you know, Me Too was seismic and generational. Now I tend to think that it just has a pretty significant blast radius, as you put it. And so we'll see it among Gen Z, but we may not see it in Gen Alpha or even younger Gen Zers, who just were not young enough to be paying attention to this stuff. So there might be that cohort of like, you know, a six, seven year, eight year span of young women who came of age during that period, who said like, it was really important. And then not for not for folks coming after.

• 56:44Chris Williamson?

  What are the implications of this gender divide for the world of dating?

• 56:49Speaker 01

  It's hard to, I mean, in one way, so if we were talking about politics, I think it's a little bit overstated. You know, The Washington Post came out with an article sort of saying that the political divide and the salience of politics and dating could have significant repercussions because there are more, there are many more conservative men than than the broad women. So like, there's a, there's a dating mismatch there. But I think like, when you talk to people about dating, and we did like 30 in-depth interviews among young people, it was a lot about, I just want someone who treats me well. You know, who is respectful, you know, the kind of things that you would expect,

• 57:33Speaker 01

  you know, people to say just in general about the kind of relationships, platonic or romantic, that they were after. And politics didn't come up that often, even the issue of abortion, which seems like there's of any issue that you, that could be like a deal breaker, of which there's not a lot of common ground to be to be found. A significant number of young women, even liberal young women, sort of said like, well, it might make things difficult, but it was not an essential deal breaker for them.

• 58:00Chris Williamson?

  Wow. So how much, how much of that do you think is?

• 58:06Chris Williamson?

  As far as I'm aware, having a mismatch in values and something like abortion is a pretty strong sort of fundamental value about the way that you see the world. It's probably indicative of a lot of other things. It's more of a keystone than your view on economic policy, I would imagine, like more interpersonal. How much of that do you think is people wanting to give what sounds like a balanced answer to pollsters, but when it comes to actually dating someone, it may be something that they can't get past?

• 58:37Speaker 01

  Right, and I think any question, like we asked in that 2023 survey, a list of, I think, like 20 items, like, would you be more or less likely or more or less likely to date someone who live with their parents, smoke cigarettes, like all these different types of lifestyle, behavioral, sort of social demographic background questions? And so it's, you're asking people to make these judgments without a real person standing there, and, you know, people tend to think very differently when they're, you know, thinking in the abstract.

• 59:09Chris Williamson?

  It's like, is there a name for that? It's like white coat syndrome, I guess, in medicine, but is there an equivalent, like observer effect? Is that, what would you call that?

• 59:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't, I don't know if there's a technical term for it in polling, but I, again, there's a challenge in trying to get people to, to, yeah.

• 59:26Chris Williamson?

  Well, first off, tell the truth, but secondly, know the truth.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:28Chris Williamson?

  How well do we know?

• 59:30Speaker 01

  And what their actual priorities are in terms of the qualities they want in a partner, it's incredibly difficult. And so, but I think like, one of the things that's happening in online dating is that you can, you can pre-sort all that stuff, right? I can sort of say, this is what I think I want, and lo and behold, the algorithm can can spit out, you know, a whole bunch of different matches for me. And for women, they can still find matches regardless of what kind of restrictions they put on. Men, you know, have a harder time in online dating.

• 1:00:01Chris Williamson?

  So I'm trying to work out whether or not the world of dating has become more or less political, because what you've just said there makes it sound like it's, ah, well, maybe, you know, it's just someone that cares about me and is a normal, balanced human. But then on other sides, you know, it's like 55% of young women would be less likely to date a Trump supporter. Thirty-nine say the same about the possibility of dating a Republican, and 76% of young women with a college degree say they would be less inclined to date a Trump supporter. "I'd rather die alone than date a conservative man," said one woman.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, and I think this is where the politics and the personal get kind of fused. Trump has very effectively politicized all these things that weren't all that political. I remember people before the pandemic, they were saying, you know, what this country really needs is an external challenge that we can bring us together, like 9/11, this horrific tragedy, an attack on American soil.

• 1:00:59Chris Williamson?

  Common humanity.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that we rallied around and even Democrats, you know, had.

• 1:01:03Chris Williamson?

  You mean like a global pandemic that didn't help at all?

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  Right. And of course, you know, that became immediately politicized. And Trump bears, you know, some responsibility there, but it certainly wasn't all him. And so I think, yeah, when it comes to Trump, I think one of the things that we heard, we saw in the survey and heard from the people we interviewed, was that it wasn't politics. Like, they didn't care about his economic plan. They didn't really, you know, that was not the deal breaker issue for them. It was his treatment of people, particularly women, that I think leads them to be like, okay, well.

• 1:01:40Chris Williamson?

  You mean like his personal?

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:42Chris Williamson?

  The way that he comes across.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  He made it incredibly personally, incredibly negatively, and people who he thinks have wronged him. The language that he uses, he is, you know, you know, Adam Sura at the Atlantic said the famous article that the cruelty was the point and he behaves absolutely cruelly to, you know, many people. And I think, you know, for, for folks who are saying, wow, like, if someone really, not just like will vote for him, but like really adores this guy, and there's lots of Americans who do, what does that say about how they might treat me or like what I mean to them as a woman or like, you know, those kinds of things. And like, we heard that a lot. We heard that a lot from the women who, who said that this would be a deal breaker for them. So we're not about

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  policy. You could say it was kind of about politics because Trump was president, he's a Republican president. But I think a lot of it was his, his personal behavior, his decorum. You know, the, the stuff with the porn star, the, the infidelity, I mean, he just ticks so many boxes that I think a lot of women, they just like, they found reprehensible.

• 1:02:47Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. A potential solution that's been put forward for this is for women to trad fish or for men to woke fish, that there's basically a blue ocean if you date unassortively in terms of your sex's typical direction of political orientation.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, and there's like, you know, I'm, I'm learning about this all this kind of secondhand. I've been married for almost 10 years now, but from what my younger research assistants will tell me when it comes to, to dating and stuff that I've read, that some conservative men will then identify as moderate on their dating profile in order to get, to get dates from liberal women. Liberal women actually know this, so now they won't date moderates. There's some amount of.

• 1:03:36Chris Williamson?

  Adjustment of the sites in a way that like, no, I'm gonna have to.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  I gotta, I gotta move a little bit, the cursor a little bit more to the left, I guess.

• 1:03:45Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's not just men and women not being able to find partners, though. Young men are just checking out of dating altogether quite a lot. Have you got any idea what's causing that?

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  So yeah, it's not just dating. I mean, there's workforce stuff. I mean, that's not an area of primary focus for me, but like there's, there's men who are just checking out kind of all together. The, you know, video games, I think are a common culprit there. I think when it comes to, you know, their economic ambitions, I think it's just, it's tough to know like what the trajectory there is for them. Like what, what do they see as the goal? I think in previous generation, we kind of, you know, there was like, okay, you do this, this, this, and this. But I think for young men today, I think there's just a lot of, they feel kind of adrift. And then

• 1:04:37Chris Williamson?

  Have you looked at Nicholas Eberstadt's work?

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. So he's AI and has done some great work. He's at the same organization that I'm, American Enterprise Institute.

• 1:04:47Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay.

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  So yeah, so he's done some, some great work on that. And I, and I think it's, yeah, it's, it's absolutely right that, that when you, you sort of see your goal, sort of say, okay, I want a good job, good career. I want marriage. I want, you know, kids, a house, you know, with a mortgage and all that. It can be, you know, it can be hard to, to get that. But then at least with those goals in mind, you can sort of say, okay, I know what I have to do. And I feel like that, those kind of, kind of North Star places, like orientation is, is kind of missing now from, from young men. In terms of like what they're doing and said, yeah, so video games, I actually, I don't think a lot of people have thought about this yet in terms of the, the sort of, the way

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  it's going to impact relationships and dating, but like the AI girlfriend thing is something that I've, I've written about a bit and am concerned that similar to how pornography gives you an absolutely warped view of, of sex and sexual relationships, I think AI girlfriends and that kind of interactions is going to give young men an absolutely warped idea of any kind of relationships, whether platonic, platonic or romantic.

• 1:06:01Chris Williamson?

  Because there's never any disagreement that needs to be dealt with. Everything is

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  affirmation, affirmation, affirmation, you know, there to respond whenever, wherever. And I think it's going to be pretty popular because of that. We're seeing this, this increase in loneliness. We, we did a survey back in 2021 and we identified this, this the friendship recession, quote unquote. Which was afflicting men significantly more harshly than women. And so a lot of this is is something that that could conceivably, you know, be a pretty significant problem because it's going to be attractive for folks who are saying, well, I have a hard time, you know, meeting people. My friends aren't really giving me the support that I want and I can't find a partner. So,

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  you know, I'm going to turn back to screens, you know, VR headsets, video games.

• 1:06:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yeah. So a couple of insights I've learned from evolutionary psychology friends. One of the problems that you're going to encounter with AI girlfriends is that there is no prestige associated with having one. It's the same reason that people don't advertise how many OnlyFans creators they subscribe to or whatever. Because selection is so much of the prestige that comes with being in a relationship. Not only was I able to get this person, but they chose me. Whereas if you've got the price of a cheeseburger per month and you can buy a VR girlfriend, the degree of prestige and status that's associated with that, I don't think that should be undercounted. I think that that that counts for an awful lot, like deep down for men.

• 1:07:37Chris Williamson?

  Now, you might say, well, the same is true of having a real friendship as opposed to one that's on the internet. And look at how many people are spending all of their time on screens and social media. I don't, I don't disagree. But for the people, and I think about this a lot. I'm not a gamer. I was like, I played Xbox a good bit, but I wasn't like addicted or I didn't really use it all that much when I was younger, but I don't now. And I think I

• 1:08:03Chris Williamson?

  I don't fully account for just how compelling and compulsive that is, especially for young guys. I think the video games industry is worth more than the TV, movie and music industries all combined together. Like video games know more about human nature and human behavior and how to manipulate it and capture it than every other industry put together. So, yeah, even for the people listening to like, nah, video games, you know what? Fucking like playing a bit of card on an evening, like blah, blah, blah.

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  They've gotten good. I, my, my boys just got an Xbox. Their, their uncle got it, got it for them. So I have a five year old and a seven year old. And the games have gotten really like I have not played video games for years. I used to, but they've gotten real good. I was playing Gears of War V before my wife maybe uninstall it because they didn't want the boys coming across it because it's pretty violent.

• 1:09:00Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  But yeah, I mean, it's immersive, it's engaging. You can sit there for hours and hours and hours. And I think like, yeah, there's, you know, again, you can sort of laugh at like, oh, you know, video games and this should not be monopolizing people's time, but it clearly is. The amount of time that young people are spending on these things is, young men is growing and really significant.

• 1:09:24Chris Williamson?

  What's happening with life satisfaction?

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  It's low among young adults, but it's always been kind of low, like comparatively, right? So we tend to be happier as we go older. We have more friends when we're younger. But in terms of the kind of insecurities that we have, the way we think about our lives, I think that that the way that we feel in our teens and early twenties, there's a lot of of just life cycle stuff that that we tend to grow out of. Now, we're in a different environment now with social media. So I think, you know, there's, there's been scholars and researchers looking at the social, the, you know, anxiety producing effects of social

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  media and it's, it seems huge. I've not looked at it a ton myself, but it seems like really, really important and it's focused on women, but I think men too are suffer from this a little bit too.

• 1:10:20Chris Williamson?

  For the third time in more than two decades, less than half of Americans say they are very satisfied with the way things are going in their personal lives. The 47% of US adults expressing high satisfaction with their lives has edged down three percentage points over the last year and is only one point higher than the 2011 record low for the trend. Not good.

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  So, yeah, and I think Gallup recently did this whole multi-country look at happiness and life satisfaction. And the really interesting thing to me was how huge the generation gap was. So at one point, there wasn't a huge difference between where older people were and younger people were. But now I think United States has one of the largest generation gaps in terms of happiness and life satisfaction of any country.

• 1:11:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, but you know, this slow life strategy that Gene Twangies looked at, I know Jonathan Haidt's looked at it as well, this extended adolescence, as it's called, young people getting their driver's licenses later, moving out of the house later, getting their first job later, starting dating later.

• 1:11:21Chris Williamson?

  I wonder how much, how many of those things, like it's a risk aversion, it's like generalized risk aversion against change and safety, leaving the house, Scott Galloway got in trouble for basically saying that unless, if you're still living at home with your parents, unless you're asleep, you shouldn't be in the house. And people were

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  I, I, I second that as a parent of young boys, like get out of the house, go play.

• 1:11:44Chris Williamson?

  But that might be a way for you to get a little bit of peace. But yeah, I, I, I understand personal motivations aside, that

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  No, it's independence and agency, right? Like that you, you, you learn, like I was just talking with a colleague today, like it's the importance of being bored, right? To come up with your own games, be imaginative, find ways to, to figure things out yourself. So that you're, you're not, I mean, I think this generation of parents, and I, you know, I count myself as part, part of this problem, were kind of overly engaged. I mean, the, the common terms of like helicopter parenting or snowplow parenting, I think is absolutely right, that we're, we're doing too much for them and things that they should be doing themselves, that we're not readily letting them do. And so they're not learning agency, they're not learning independence.

• 1:12:29Chris Williamson?

  I looked at this interesting thing about life satisfaction, a highest amongst upper income, married and religious adults. A few groups, a few groups have majority saying that they are very satisfied. This includes those with annual household incomes of $100,000 or more, married adults, those who attend religious services regularly, college graduates, Democrats, and those aged 55 or older. So you're like, sort of threading the needle there through, and I'm going to guess a number of those, maybe, I don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me if married adults have high household income, if people who are earning a little bit more are more likely to be religious, you know, like all of these things will stack on top.

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I think that's right. And, and we've done research on this too, the, the class divide in religious participation. So at one point, there wasn't a huge attendance difference in, between people who had a college degree and those without. So you go back 30, 40 years. Pretty much the same, everyone was attending at relatively high rates. Then over the next 20, 25 years, a significant gap emerged with the, the non-college folks attending at far less, less high rates than the folks who went to college. So it's the, it's the college educated folks are getting married, uh, you know, invested in the religious communities, engaged in community life. And that has a multiplicative effect, right?

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  Like you are getting support systems at a, across the different institutions. You are availing yourself of information of all these important things in life that is, strongly correlated with happiness and contentment.

• 1:14:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. How do you sort of come to conceptualize everything that we've gone through today? Sort of what's your, what's your view of the, of the current state of things and the trajectory moving forward?

• 1:14:14Speaker 01

  So, uh, I'm a little bit of a resident pessimist. I, I, you know, cannot look at this data and think like, wow, um, you know, what is happening, you know, cause we, we do a, a lot of surveys on a lot of different topics from, from dating to religious demography, um, to politics. We're doing a, a working class survey and we haven't talked about this, but the, I think that one of the, the really concerning things for me is trust and rather it's, it's precipitous decline. So if you look at young people today and on a variety of different measures, but you just ask them like, how much do you think people can be trusted? They're far lower, like 30 points lower than, than older Americans. Um, whether they think people will take advantage of them again, like there's like a 30 or 40

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  point divide, most, uh, people, young people say that they do. And I, I don't want to be constantly pointing the finger at social media, but again, I think it, it makes some sense adaptively, right? If I'm engaging with strangers a lot, when, when people have access to my profile, they can, they can message me, um, a lot of times I'm, I'm, you know, getting negative interactions online. Uh, of course I should be a little bit suspicious, right? I, I'm not being socialized in my sort of geographic community where people know each other, where there's a lot of support.

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  But I'm, I'm, I'm kind of in the wild west where. You know, I don't know people's motivations. I don't know what they're going to do. And so it I think it pays to kind of be cautious and think the worst of people. And so I think that to me is a pretty significant difference in the way people are being raised today versus, you know, a generation before social media.

• 1:15:57Chris Williamson?

  That's that hyper vigilance again, right? I can't necessarily trust people. I don't know if they have best interests at heart. And the other thing, I can't remember who said it, but basically that the internet has made psychopaths out of all of us, that it permits you to do things online that you would never do in person.

• 1:16:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:16:14Chris Williamson?

  Basically no repercussions. And if you don't think that this is true, log into any first person shooter lobby and hear what people say to each other. Like just the things that people say, there's no way that you would dare say that. Even face to face, let alone in a small village, you know, 100 years ago, where you knew everybody and reputation would get around and you're held accountable for your actions and things like that. So what's the natural response? The natural response is this vigilance, uncertainty, I'm going to protect myself, I'm never actually going to be emotionally open or vulnerable or invest in anybody else because they might move on quite quickly. And I've had all of these bad experiences. Look at how terrible humans are. Humans overall were a scourge on the earth. That probably contributes

• 1:16:58Chris Williamson?

  to the climate change. Oh, we don't need to worry about birth rate decline because there's too many people on the planet in any case, and humans are kind of a bit of a cancer. So, you know, it is the most like multi-headed Hydra head thing of all time. But when you actually zoom out enough, it does the patterns and the shape start to make a little bit of sense. Things are moving in directions and you can begin to see how each of the different contributing elements make stuff go toward that direction.

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, if I could like, you know, move up the chain and sort of say, what is the thing up here that is gonna be influencing everything downstream? I do think it comes down to Uh, this kind of communitarian impulse that we've lost. This that, that, um, you know, we're so obsessed with the way that we look, how we're being perceived, we're, we're interested in our own career, career trajectory, um, our own professional success and the validation that we get from it as opposed to like, well, how much are you volunteering? Uh, you know, what kind of activities are you doing in furtherance of, of some, some, something or someone other than yourself? Um, how are we rewarding that culturally?

• 1:18:08Speaker 01

  Uh, and so I think like the, the fact that we don't have that impulse, we don't have that, that greater good ambition. Um, and that we're, that we're seeing each other in, in the real world more often that we're, we're, you know, from, from Putnam, uh, on, we, we've known that we've been in kind of a civic decline. And I think we need to, you know, rebuild a lot of our institutions. We need to encourage young people. Not just to have amazing resumes, but actually be amazing people and, and support the people around them. Um, so you're not checking boxes, but you're actually, you know, having real experiences with real people. And you know what? There's value in, uh, you know, hanging out and chasing your friends around with sticks, right? There's value in that, right? Uh,

• 1:18:53Speaker 01

  I, I see as for like Russian math classes around my neighborhood, I, I live in a pretty nice part of DC. And just like, well, yeah, you could do that, but I'd rather have, have my kids, um, spend time with their friends just out in the neighborhood or out biking around and, uh, and I think some of that probably stems from this kind of competitive impulse, right? That we, I want my kids to get in really good schools. It's a competitive education environment. Um, if, if, you know, they make a mistake, they're going to fall off the ladder and, you know, there's not a, uh, sort of safety net for them. Um, so I just, they, they just have to do everything right. And I think if we could get off that a little bit and, and you know, refocus our

• 1:19:36Speaker 01

  attention and, and the way we spend our time with, you know, towards furthering a broader interest, I think we'd be well, you know, much better served by it.

• 1:19:47Chris Williamson?

  Daniel Cox, ladies and gentlemen. Daniel, I love your work. I think that the insights that you're able to bring, which kind of add a bit of statistical rigidity to the insights that people are seeing and sort of stuff that people feel. It's like, I've got this trend that I've noticed online a little bit, but like, you know, it's there. It's there in front of you. You can almost sort of grab it. I really appreciate the work that you do. Your Substack's fantastic. Where should people go? They want to check out all the things you do on the internet.

• 1:20:12Speaker 01

  So you can check out our website, Survey Center on American Life, and then I write American Storylines on Substack. So check it out.

• 1:20:19Chris Williamson?

  Hell yeah. Daniel, I appreciate you. Thank you.

• 1:20:21Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.