How Social Issues Are Driving A Wedge Between Young Men And Women
(ANALYSIS) Let me just start this post off by saying that I got the inspiration for this data exercise from reading Dan Cox’s excellent Substack: American Storylines.
It was specifically this post from March 20: “The Gender Gap in Church is Growing.” Dan took four questions that focused on social issues from the Pew Religious Landscape study and demonstrated how young Christian men and young Christian women have differing views on abortion and LGBTQ+ topics.
What he uncovered was that Christian women aged 18-24 are significantly more progressive on each issue compared to men of the same age. For instance, 54% of the female sample said that “acceptance of transgender people is a positive change.” It was only 29% of the male sample. That’s not a small gap! It’s a chasm, really.
READ: Rethinking Race And Religion In America
This entry is part of a much larger narrative emerging in the data that young men and young women are headed in completely different directions. Young men have stopped leaving church in droves and are probably just as religious as young women at this point.
But the other side of that coin is that young men seem to be either moving to the right of the ideological spectrum or not budging from a more moderate position. At the same time, younger women are clearly trending toward the left — especially on social issues.
This Pew data is really helpful with regards to trying to track down exactly why there’s this huge gender divide happening among the youngest adults in the United States.
So, I took the four questions that Dan plucked out of the Landscape Survey and wanted to just break down those responses based on a bunch of factors — gender, ideology, and age. My aim here is to try and unpack this causal puzzle as much as I can.
It’s always a good idea to start really broadly, so here is the share who answered affirmatively to each of these four questions in the entire sample and then broken down by the political ideology of each respondent.
You can read the rest of Ryan Burge’s post on Substack.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.