When I was growing up in the 1990s, couples counselor John Gray penned a book on gender relations with an instantly memorable title: Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. The book argued that men and women have fundamentally different communication styles, which can be major sources of tension in heterosexual relationships. To call it a hit is a massive understatement: Gray’s book has sold 15 million copies worldwide, and was even adapted into a Broadway show (starring Gray) in the late 1990s.
Yet Men Are From Mars’s broad generalizations — “Men are motivated when they feel needed while women are motivated when they feel cherished” — haven’t held up. Feminist critics who challenged the book’s simplistic narrative at the time have largely been validated by subsequent scientific research, which finds that men and women don’t act nearly as differently as stereotypes suggest.
The lesson here is that gender-divide stories are intuitively appealing but awfully easy to overstate. Any new claims that men and women are behaving differently should be approached with caution — a maxim that’s as true in the political world as anywhere else.
In the past weeks and months, a narrative has emerged that young men and women are moving to politically different planets. In countries as diverse as the United States, Germany, and South Korea, some data suggests that 18- to 29-year-old men are becoming increasingly conservative while their female peers are tilting to the left. The tone of this coverage can be dire: The Washington Post’s editorial board recently fretted that the gender political divide would soon imperil the institution of marriage itself.
But political scientists who study gender and politics generally tell a different story. There has been a longstanding political gender gap between men and women in advanced democracies. But the gap is often small, its causes unclear, and the effects typically overstated. While it’s possible that this…
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