A sign of the times: women step up

Joyce Vance summed up E. Jean Carroll's $83 million victory over Donald Trump in the defamation trial. He can't (freely) rage about someone he has harmed.

For the last week and a half, we’ve had the rare experience of watching a Judge and a jury impose accountability on Donald Trump for his words and deeds. It was reassuring. E. Jean Carroll will forever be a national hero, a treasure. Where Republican leaders have groveled at Trump’s feet, she has shown incredible bravery, and we are all better off for it.

E. Jean acts as a brave 80-year old role model. Some combination of repulsion at the Dobbs decision stripping away their right to abortion and perhaps of awareness of #MeToo has young U.S. women looking to each other for values and understanding at an increasing rate.

This is widely true in the rich world. Adam Tooze pulled this from the Financial Times: 

...  today’s under-thirties are undergoing a great gender divergence … Gen Z is two generations, not one. In countries on every continent, an ideological gap has opened up between young men and women. Tens of millions of people who occupy the same cities, workplaces, classrooms and even homes no longer see eye-to-eye.

In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes were each spread roughly equally across liberal and conservative world views, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries. That gap took just six years to open up. Germany also now shows a 30-point gap between increasingly conservative young men and progressive female contemporaries, and in the UK the gap is 25 points. In Poland last year, almost half of men aged 18-21 backed the hard-right Confederation party, compared to just a sixth of young women of the same age.   

Seven years on from the initial #MeToo explosion, the gender divergence in attitudes has become self-sustaining. Survey data show that in many countries the ideological differences now extend beyond this issue. The clear progressive-vs-conservative divide on sexual harassment appears to have caused — or at least is part of — a broader realignment of young men and women into liberal and conservative camps respectively on other issues.

In the US, UK and Germany, young women now take far more liberal positions on immigration and racial justice than young men, while older age groups remain evenly matched. The trend in most countries has been one of women shifting left while men stand still, but there are signs that young men are actively moving to the right in Germany, where today’s under-30s are more opposed to immigration than their elders, and have shifted towards the far-right AfD in recent years.

It would be easy to say this is all a phase that will pass, but the ideology gaps are only growing, and data shows that people’s formative political experiences are hard to shake off. All of this is exacerbated by the fact that the proliferation of smartphones and social media mean that young men and women now increasingly inhabit separate spaces and experience separate cultures.

I see a lot of heartache and a lot of hope for the young and courageous.