The Gender War Is Increasingly Fueled by Women

However, the problem appears to be worse than mere political differences between the sexes. An asymmetry in how men and women view each other more broadly is also emerging. A recent poll from U.K. polling firm Merlin Strategy has exposed a growing divide between young men and women with some surprising findings. Far fewer young women than men report holding positive views of the opposite sex, while young women under 30 are three times as likely as young men to view the opposite sex negatively. Male gender resentment is an issue, but it should be represented accurately Despite something of a media panic in recent years concerning growing misogyny among young men due to the rise in popularity of androcentric ideologies, new polling suggests young men view women substantially more positively than the reverse. You wouldn’t know it, though, with how many think pieces, documentaries, and even government policies have come out of the woodwork anticipating a Handmaid’s Tale -style coup to send women back to the kitchen. The reasoning has been that subcultures like the manosphere, red pill movement, and inceldom have risen in popularity and visibility alongside toxic alpha-male-style influencers like Andrew Tate. Rising resentment against women as a class is a real social phenomenon we should take seriously, but how widespread it is is harder to measure. Because of their online origins, these views largely stew in the shadows through online anonymity. New polling suggests young men view women substantially more positively than the reverse. It’s also difficult to determine how much of the audience for this content is homegrown, within the U.S. or even the broader Western world, as opposed to finding an audience in people from more patriarchal cultures. Even so, just last year, we saw a wave of culturally relevant media and public policy initiatives seeking to address “ a whirlpool of hatred and misogyny, ” as former U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer put it. Netflix released Adolescence , a fictional television series exploring online misogyny, incel culture, and the radicalization of young boys. The show became a cultural phenomenon and was subsequently invoked in government discussions about online misogyny. With Starmer’s support, Netflix made the series available to stream for free in secondary schools across the country to spark a national conversation “on misogyny, on online content, and this sense of children, particularly boys, getting drawn into this world.” In 2022, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security assessed that involuntary celibate violent extremists pose a persistent threat of violence against women, heterosexual couples, and others perceived as successful in sexual or romantic pursuits. In reality, approximately 50 people have been killed in roughly a dozen ideologically motivated incel killings around the world. While online forums filled with self-identified incels do attract angry and sexually frustrated young men, William Costello, a doctoral researcher in evolutionary psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the largest study of incels to date, has warned that sensationalized portrayals have distorted public understanding of these communities. “Policy decisions should be based on sober research, not guided by highly emotive dramatizations,” he wrote in response to U.K. officials citing Adolescence in policy discussions and referring to it as a “ documentary .” Costello, one of the leading researchers on incel communities, puts the number of established incel killers at around 7 to 15. For reference, there are currently more than 41,000 active members in the most popular incel forum. In the largest survey of incels across the U.S. and U.K., only 5% say violence is often justified, while previous research found roughly 80% reject violence. Despite this, incels are treated as a potential terror threat in several Western countries, despite being considerably more likely to suffer from depression and suicidal ideation . Then came the release of Louis Theroux’s documentary, Inside the Manosphere , a popular documentary on manosphere influencers that revealed that many of its thinkers came from broken homes with absent fathers. Again, the headlines were about a misogyny panic. Australia’s May 2026 eSafety Commissioner warned that boys and young men are consistently recommended manosphere content, regardless of whether they seek it out, and that despite self-help and advice content offering real benefits, “it often serves as a gateway to, and a cover for, increasingly extreme and malicious manosphere content” that “deliberately plays on boys’ and young men’s feelings of insecurity, resentment and shame.” But another recent Ofcom study of 38 men who engaged with online “manosphere” content, including Andrew Tate, found that society may have overestimated the risk. The participants were reportedly “capable of discarding messages that did not resonate with their values,” and one said they viewed it as entertainment, like a horror movie or a video game. None of the participants agreed with Tate’s most extreme misogyny. A March survey from the Institute for Family Studies found that most young men associate manhood with responsibility and sacrifice and, notably, “were not enthralled by on-line influencers as their role models.” Young men were given a list of prominent men like Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg, and Andrew Tate, each designed to represent “different approaches to being a man,” and then asked how much they looked up to each as a role model. They were then asked how much they looked up to people in their personal lives, such as parents, religious leaders, bosses, coaches, and teachers, as role models. Mothers and fathers topped the list, followed by coaches and teachers. At the top of the influential public figures list, Barack Obama and LeBron James were the most admired, while Andrew Tate was the least. Holding sexist views against women loudly and publicly still has great consequences, not limited to deplatforming, de-banking, and even government classification as a potential extremist threat. But what about gender resentment that doesn’t live in the shadows, and instead, shouts it from the rooftops? New polling shows women, not men, hold more antagonistic gender views A recent article from the New Statesman , which is by no means a right-wing or even centrist publication—both AllSides and Ground News rate its political bias as firmly left-wing—reports a “new radicalism among young women.” The polling reveals men’s apparent unrequited positive feelings toward women. Among 2,000 polled British 18-to-30-year-olds, a staggering 72% of men under 30 say they view women positively. Another 21% reported neutral feelings, while only 7% held a negative view. The same is not true for women: only 50% of women under 30 hold positive views of men. Another 29% were neutral, while 21% viewed men negatively. The youngest cohort of women under 25 held the most hostile views toward men, with only 35% expressing positive feelings and 27% expressing negative ones. The largest share was neutral, at 37%. Men also reported feeling overwhelmingly understood by women and had higher trust in members of the opposite gender, while women reported much lower scores on both questions. More than four in 10 women said men did not have the same understanding of consent in sexual relationships that they did, compared to 25% of men. But wait, how can this be? We’ve been told incessantly that sexist and hostile gendered attitudes were all coming from one direction: a generation of far-right, misogynistic, Andrew Tate-loving men. Not only does the data paint a disparate picture, with most of the negativity coming from women, but as Merlin Strategy’s founder Scarlett Maguire puts it , “it’s not even reciprocated on the young men’s side.” When we dig a little deeper into these polls, a bigger picture emerges. Not only are women more cynical about men; they’re more cynical in general. Young women report lower levels of happiness, excitement, fulfillment, and ambition than young men. Despite being better off economically than their male peers in the U.K. (as is the case for women under 30 in certain U.S. cities), young women are more likely to believe the economy works against them, according to the New Statesman. They also view communism substantially more favorably than capitalism. This was in keeping with the broader findings that the most “privileged” groups had the most pessimistic views. Young white women feel less valued by society than non-white women, and middle-class women are less likely to believe they’ll succeed if they work hard than working-class women. Only 50% of women under 30 hold positive views of men. Contrary to the popular belief that the growing political divide between young men and women is driven by men’s hard swing to the right, men have largely remained politically static. Women, however, have moved sharply to the left in a relatively short period. Back in 2024, the Financial Times first reported on a growing global gender divide between men and women. This divide was especially pronounced among Gen Z. Per Gallup data, women ages 18 to 30 in the U.S. were 30 percentage points more liberal than their male peers. That gap formed in just six years, following decades of relative political parity. The FT revealed “the trend in most countries has been one of women shifting left while men stand still,” with a few instances of men moving to the right in certain countries, like Germany. Two years later, the New Statesman replicated the same trends in its own exclusive polling : Women under 30 are much more inclined to be on the left economically than men their own age and are more likely to support wealth redistribution. They are also more soured on capitalism than men, with women under 25 showing the same favorability rating of capitalism as fascism. They also have more favorable views on social justice, communism, and environmentalism, and are much less willing to entertain men with different social and political views than them; some won’t even entertain bipartisan friendship s with men. One in four young women say having different political views would be a “red flag” in a partner, while six in 10 would find it difficult to date someone who disagreed with them on the Israel-Palestine conflict or Donald Trump. A staggering 74% say they would find it difficult to be in a relationship with someone who did not share their views on social justice. Young women are also more likely than young men to rule out a relationship with someone who disagrees with them on immigration. Young women were also twice as likely as young men to say they would not like to have children, at 15% compared to men’s 8%. Among white women under 30, that figure rose to one in five. Across virtually all metrics, men and women seem to have totally different beliefs, values, and lifestyle preferences. Most serious of all, though, is just how venomous young women’s attitude is toward men in general. These are hardly surprising findings if you have access to the internet or have spoken to any woman under 30 for all of five minutes. Between feeling embarrassed to have a boyfriend, having virtually no male friends , and the omnipresent fear of being accused of not being a “ girl’s girl ” or, worse, a “ pick-me ,” and the term “heteropessimism” entering the popular lexicon, something has clearly happened between men and women. It’s felt most acutely on the female side, while some men are beginning to say the quiet part out loud: “Imagine being a young man trying to date now when only a third of women like men as a general idea.” Why do young women hate young men? It’s not just that young women aren’t interested in dating certain or most young men; it’s that they seem to dislike them explicitly. In a complementary piece for the New Statesman , Emily Lawford unpacks how women’s engagement with “the femosphere,” an emerging online ecosystem that mirrors the manosphere by reinforcing women’s alienation from men and society through grievance politics, has influenced this hostility. While it spans a “range of tones,” she says, “much of it reinforces this hostility towards men,” whether the focus of the content is on progressive politics, activism about some atrocity, or a more overt misandrist dating coach encouraging women to go their own way. The throughline seems to be that the world is a miserable place for women (even if things have never been better for them), and men only add to that misery. We know that spending more time online distorts our perceptions of reality. This can become all the more dangerous when that time is spent in political echo chambers that run on misery porn. Lawford spoke with such women who seem to have been ideologically captured by their algorithms. They think of themselves as sullen revolutionaries, while their male peers are pitiable, empathy-less droids who don’t care much about “real issues” unless they can be used as an angle for sex. Or it’s that women are annoyed at the ways men express that care: through planning and execution of logistics over having a good cry about how terrible everything is. This apparently is exactly what happened with some women Lawford interviewed who were engaged in protests and activism related to Gaza. The women equated men’s desire to take action with a lack of empathy rather than empathy taking on a different expression. These women were political radicals and their activism consumed their entire lives. Spending more time online distorts our perceptions of reality. Some women spoke of their belief that women were more likely to be progressive than men because they “tend to be a little bit more connected to their bodies and their physical sensations and emotions.” Lawford took note of the “unusually essentialist or even reactionary view of gender.” She reportedly spoke to many other women whose opinions on sex were reminiscent of sex-negative radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin. Most talked of empathy as though it were second nature to women but alien to men. The interviewed women also struggled to fathom not caring about the news, not being progressive, not being angry. One woman described pain as emblematic of the female experience, drawing on the pain of periods, childbirth, and characterizations of first-time sexual experiences. But gendered violence in particular wasn’t what characterized women’s bleak outlook on life; it was everything. While the 2024 report from the FT tracked this growing gendered political polarization back to the MeToo movement, the New Statesman pointed to young experience as part of the “COVID generation,” whose formative years were disrupted by the pandemic, as a possible contributor. Attending university, spending a lot of time online, and engaging with polarizing moral issues like the war in Gaza were also correlated with radicalization. As women and men are treated more alike, they become more different? Other factors may also be at play, however. One possibility is the gender-equality paradox , where “societies with higher levels of wealth, political equality, and women in the workforce show larger personal, social, and political differences between men and women.” “In other words,” writes author and psychologist Rob Henderson , “the wealthier and more egalitarian the country, the larger the gender differences.” Henderson goes on to explain how this pattern extends far beyond political ideology, into temperament, personality, and even physical differences. In societies that are most gender equal and “have gone the furthest in attempting to treat women and men the same,” more pronounced gender differences emerge in all manner of areas, from academic preferences and self-esteem to frequency of crying and interest in casual sex to even physical differences like height, BMI, obesity, and blood pressure. Data show that the higher gender equality a country has, the more pronounced sexually dimorphic traits like height become. In other words, men are literally larger and taller in more egalitarian countries. This could explain the unique predicament men and women find themselves in right now, during a time of such technological and reproductive novelty. Women are navigating a society that has contended with several different waves of feminist rhetoric insisting upon women’s oppression by various patriarchal forces, only to find themselves now in a position of relative power. They are outperforming men at every level of education and increasingly in jobs, earning power, and general life outcomes. Numerous technologies have also enabled women to take control of their lives and reproduction, including the birth control pill, dating apps, and abortion access, giving them more leverage over their love lives, autonomy, and family formation. The MeToo movement was a social reckoning that punished predatory men in positions of power, and perhaps some others who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The higher gender equality a country has, the more pronounced sexually dimorphic traits like height become. Altogether, these forces have flattened, if not inverted, many of the traditional disparities between men and women. The supposed progressive repackaging of “gender essentialism” could actually be us seeing preexisting differences between men and women, such as neuroticism , threat sensitivity , and risk aversion , becoming more pronounced via the gender-equality paradox. Other differences may be interacting with a uniquely modern environment. It’s no secret women are more relational and have a greater orientation toward care . It’s why we tend to see so many women in nursing, teaching, and caretaking professions. When you combine the relational aspect of social media with the moralization of modern politics, that can look like social contagion. Just take a look at the Lindsay Clancy case on TikTok. One study in particular feels like a diagnostic manual for Lawford’s ethnography of angry young women. Across 67 countries, women scored higher than men on care (dislike for the suffering of others), fairness (concern about equitability), and purity (concerns with spiritual or physical contamination). Differences in moral judgments between men and women were larger in more gender-equal societies, with the care gap widening as gender equality increased. Perhaps this helps explain heightened gender differences in political opinions, empathy, neuroticism, and an overactivation of women’s empathetic activity, now directed toward social and political activism. Whatever the reason, we haven’t yet started treating young women’s propensity for alienation, polarization, and radicalization with even a fraction of the haste that’s been directed at young men, who the polls show are actually quite fond of us.