It has been suggested recently that men and women are drifting apart. Women are said to be more likely to lean left and to reject traditional ideas of (heterosexual) male-female relationships than men are. Men, on the other hand, are allegedly dissatisfied with recent societal changes and resentful about their loss of status. It is said also that these changes in preferences and outlook may spell doom for marriage.

Is this true?

In some ways, the genders are more integrated than ever. Most children go to mixed-gender schools rather than schools for girls only or boys only. Something similar is true of occupation. When the National Association of Realtors was founded in the US in 1908, membership was exclusively male. Today, the ratio of men to women real estate agents is close to 40% to 60%. Similarly, at the turn of the 20th Century, less than 5% of law professors were female, but today, 33% are. This suggests that both men and women interact a lot more with others of the opposite gender than people from previous generations did and talk about a wider variety of issues with each other. It would be surprising if more mixing went hand in hand with divergence in outlooks, though it is possible that outlooks converged in the past because, even though men and women rarely talked to each other, everyone embraced gender segregation.

Note, however, that informal norms favor more mixing today than they did in the past as well. When I was a child, for instance, a married person who claimed to have an opposite-gender friend was likely to be suspected of having an extra-marital affair. Men’s interactions with women and women’s with men tended to be limited to time spent with a spouse and blood relatives, or occasionally with colleagues at work, but not in private. Not today.

It is true that there are some correlations between gender and voting........

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