HELEN PATTISON reviews a recent BBC Radio Four podcast exploring a growing divergence in the voting patterns of young men and women.
Left Out, an episode of Currently, one of the BBC’s political podcasts, looks into “the political radicalisation of young women – and the silence surrounding it”. While there has been much discussion in the media about young men turning to the right, the podcast argues that young women’s shift to the “radical left” has been largely ignored.
The 2024 general election marked a turning point in the gender voting divergence. Twice as many young men as young women (18-24) voted Reform, while twice as many young women as young men voted Green. Today polls show as many as 44% of young women are considering voting Green, up from 25% in 2024.
The podcast considers why there might be a gender divide among young women and men when it comes to voting and outlook. It raises interesting points about the greater numbers of young women in universities and the separate “online worlds” that young men and women inhabit.
Like young men, young women are angry about the cost-of-living crisis – job insecurity, inflation, the housing crisis – which they explain in the podcast. But they are also angry about rising misogyny, both online and in their ‘lived experience’, and afraid about a growing ‘backlash’ against women’s rights, especially after the reversal of Roe vs Wade in the US.
There is certainly lots to be angry about. Ninety-seven percent of young women have experienced sexual harassment and there’s no doubt this is driving anger amongst them. The brutal rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer highlighted the pervasive problem of violence against women. Headlines about the Epstein scandal will have strengthened their rage.
Austerity is worsening the situation. Huge numbers of women are forced to stay in abusive relationships because domestic abuse services have been decimated by over a decade of underfunding, while specialist services for women experiencing rape and sexual violence are also under attack.
Even within the healthcare system there is a growing health gap between women and men, with women’s symptoms being less likely to be taken seriously and women spending more of their lives in poor health. This is another issue raised by the young women interviewed on the podcast.
Not just voting
But young women are not just voting ‘left’, they have also been getting active, around issues that affect them directly as women but also on other social issues. The anti-ICE protests in the US have seen large numbers of women on them, as have the protests against the war in Gaza. Greta Thunberg’s climate protests also attracted big numbers of young girls and women.
The headlines about young men being drawn in by figures like misogynist Andrew Tate and voting for Reform have certainly got a lot more coverage over the last few years. In the run up to the 2024 general election, when Labour and the Tories got their lowest combined percentage vote in a hundred years, the spectre of Reform was useful. The mainstream media ran with a story of lesser-evilism, helping to cement the idea that voters ‘had to’ go turn out for the establishment parties or risk getting Reform. At the same time, they didn’t fear that Reform would put up a challenge to their system, given its leading figure is an ex-city commodities trader.
Since the election more news stories have highlighted that Reform’s support among young men might be overblown. But that doesn’t mean that as we head into the May 2026 local elections, with both Labour and the Tories deeply unpopular, that the news story about young men’s shift to right populism can’t be rolled out again.
There is no doubt that right-populist figures in a number of countries have been able to build support bases in elections including around attacks on women’s rights. There’s an understandable fear among many young women that they will have to fight in defence of their rights. But there is also increasing polarisation in society. Out of any generation, it is only millennials where a greater number of men identified as being feminist than not. With Gen Z that number among men drops by about 20% but the number of Gen Z women who identify as feminist has continued to rise.
Societal expectations of moving out of your parents’ home, having a career, buying your own home and starting a family have all been turned upside down by the economic crisis. And both right-populist and mainstream politicians would rather feed polarisation than admit their system is letting down a whole generation who will be worse off than their parents.
The issue of inflation, sky high rents and a struggling healthcare system are all issues which both young men and young women are concerned about. But for young women the conclusion today is to fight back by looking to the ‘radical left’ and young men, increasingly told to blame the gains made by women. That said the biggest move is still for young people in general to believe the system doesn’t work for them and, most importantly, growing layers looking to left and socialist ideas irrespective of their gender.
Research also predicts the more ‘liberal’ attitudes of young people are likely to be a lasting factor. The old adage that people get more right-wing as they age doesn’t always apply. For example, the generations who saw higher public spending based on higher taxes on the rich, and saw how that spending pulled people out of poverty and had a positive impact, have tended to maintain their support for this throughout the years. It’s that experience which impacts their outlook.
Younger generations are living through the biggest gap between the extremely wealthy in society and growing numbers who can’t make ends meet. At the same time, the weakened political establishment has been rocked by sexism scandals. Their outlook is impacted by the crisis facing capitalism, which isn’t going to get better but is in fact going to get worse, undermining young people’s faith in the system to meet their needs, and resulting in bigger layers looking for a real political alternative.
The Left Out podcast is available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002ntqc