Young Men Are Going in a Very Different Direction From Young Women. It Could Completely Upend Society.

Something strange is going on with young men in America. For decades, young voters have leaned left compared to older ones: Millennials remain the most liberal generation of American adults, and as more zoomers reach adulthood, they seem set to surpass even their predecessors’ liberalism. A related shift in religiosity is also underway, with millennials being the least religious generation in American history, and members of Gen Z similarly moving away from organized faith traditions.

But within these macro trends, a divide has cleaved open. Among zoomers, young men are now more religious than young women—and women have defected from the Christian faith in larger numbers than young men. And while men, in general, are slightly more conservative than women, young men seem to be much more conservative than young women, especially as young women have banked hard to the left. And the youngest voters—those under the age of 25–may even be more conservative than voters ages 25 to 30.

According to a broad survey conducted by the American Enterprise Institute, zoomer men are also less likely to identify as feminists than millennial men, even while zoomer women are more likely to be feminists than millennial women. And young men are more likely than older ones to say men in America face some or a lot of discrimination.

Behind all of these trends—women becoming more liberal and moving away from religion and motherhood, men moving toward religiosity and conservativism and away from feminism—may be the same deeper motivation: a search for some kind of structure or purpose.

That pursuit looks very different for both of these cohorts because of real changes in each group’s circumstances, social position, and life prospects. In the U.S., women are simultaneously doing better than ever before and enjoying historic opportunities for education and work while also seeing their most basic rights—chief among them the right to determine the number and spacing of their children—not only contested but broadly constrained.

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