From a gap to a gulf? Gen Z and gender gap in political attitudes in post-industrial societies

Inglehart and Norris’s groundbreaking ‘Rising Tide,’ published in 2003, set the international research agenda regarding gender and political values for the subsequent two decades. Using World Values Survey data they found that in post-industrial societies younger generations of women moved to the political left of men as they entered paid work and higher education in greater numbers. This well-established international trend has recently been rediscovered with speculation that Gen Z men and women are surprisingly different in their attitudes to gender equality and political positioning. In this paper we use the World Values Survey and the European Values Study to replicate and extend Inglehart and Norris’s original analysis to establish whether the trend they identified in the post-World War II generations continued into the first two decades of the twenty-first century. We use cohort models to explore whether there is in fact evidence of a widening gap between men and women in the youngest generations that exceeds the expectations of Inglehart and Norris’s original thesis and explore whether Inglehart and Norris’s explanations still hold.