The tech divide driving male and female voters apart

Men have long tended to vote Republican and women Democratic, but in this election that gap has become a gaping chasm. A recent New York Times and Siena poll found that women supported Kamala Harris by a 16-point margin and men supported Trump by a nine-point margin. The interesting question is: why? What is driving men and women apart politically and what does it tell us about broader relations between the sexes?

‘Boy Twitter’

Underpinning the gender politics of this election is a longer-term trend: the cultural uncoupling of the sexes. Much of this is down to what I call algorithmic sorting. My husband and I are remarkably similar, except that he isn’t on Instagram and I am, whereas I am not on the parts of X where open-source intelligence allows you to watch wars in real time. Or, as I call it, Boy Twitter.

The hours we each spend just feet, yet worlds, apart, lost in different social media interests, usually explain the rare times when we have no idea what the other is talking about.

It doesn’t take a complicated theory or brilliant political mind to understand: part of the reason men and women are coming apart is because they are using their phones differently.

The social scientist Alice Evans is writing about this phenomenon in her forthcoming book, The Great Gender Divergence. She argues that social media isn’t the only technological change driving the phenomenon; there is also the “rise of instant personal entertainment”.

She uses Netflix as an example. “We’re no longer in a world of four channels. If men want to go on Netflix and watch Vikings, they can, and if women want to watch Emily in Paris, they can,” she says. “So that means that you can just consume totally different content and select into these different echo bubbles, in terms of books, films, stories.”

And so from our personalised Netflix preferences to whom we vote for and why we vote for them.

It’s not just America

“I think it’s really important to put this in an international perspective,” Evans says. “We see this exact same trend of this ideological polarisation between men and women in many other countries, like in South Korea.”

Evans suggests one reason for this political divergence is an increasingly “feminised public culture”. Whether good or bad, what Evans names here is plainly consequential and little discussed. “As you see a convergence in wages between men and women and you see cultural liberalisation,” she explains, “women are no longer compelled to date or marry, and that enables women to be much, much more selective. As women become more selective, you don’t have to date a guy who is rude, who is aggressive, or who is just plain tedious.”

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Evans’s explanation is one possible theory to explain recent data on how politics is affecting the way the sexes are getting along. The huge ideological gap in South Korea, where women aged 18 to 29 trend liberal by almost 30 points and men trend conservative by almost 20 points, has been identified as a factor in the country’s low fertility rate.

Things aren’t as drastic in Britain, but here too the ideological gap between conservative-leaning men and liberal-leaning women is about 20 points among those aged 18 to 29.

People don’t like dating across the political divide, as any young male Republican employee in liberal Washington will be quick to tell you. According to Wendy Wang at the Institute for Family Studies, unions between Republicans and Democrats accounted for just 4 per cent of all marriages in 2020, having declined several percentage points over the preceding few years.

The rot at the heart of all this is the growing inability to sit in a room with somebody of a different political persuasion; the performative intolerance of the left and the right we see amplified by political activist celebrities and social media commentators. It has seeped into society through screens and group chats and think pieces and is now shaping the presidential campaigns of the two main US political parties.

Trump’s campaign is glued together with hunting rifles, Maga hats and pick-up trucks. The Harris camp is, at the eleventh hour, haphazardly scrambling for some of these votes by making “dudes for Harris” ads and calling in Barack Obama to address black men specifically. In doing so, they often tend to talk about men as other, the way Sir David Attenborough talks about animals. Males in the mist.

Richard Reeves, a researcher and president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, believes the problem for Democrats is that they speak as if “men are the problem, rather than that they have problems. They’ve decided that in showing they support women, they have to run silent on the issues of boys and men — or, even worse, roll their eyes at them.”

In less than two weeks, we may know whether the US has its first female president or has re-elected a man found liable for sexual assault. But regardless of who wins, we will still be in a world where people increasingly loathe and avoid those with different politics, something that increasingly divides men and women.

When the political becomes personal it has ramifications for our prospects for falling in love, forming a family, for friendships and for culture, and even for our Netflix algorithms — for all sorts of things that, whatever the media says, are probably in a deeper sense much more important than the outcome of any US presidential election.