In the 2025 finale of the reality dating show Love is Blind, two female contestants cited conflicting views on LGBTIQ+ and women’s reproductive autonomy as decisive reasons for ending their relationships. While these moments unfolded in a popular entertainment setting rather than a political arena, they offer insight into a broader social dynamic that has increasingly attracted scholarly attention: an emerging ideological divide between young women and men. Research has long depicted younger generations as more progressive than older cohort. Yet recent evidence points to growing intra-generational divisions, suggesting that young men are drifting away from the assumed progressive consensus that once characterized their age group. Compared to young women, they express more right-leaning ideological orientations – a pattern that described as the “youth gender gap”.
This paper examines whether attitudes toward gender-related issues help explain this ideological divide. For this purpose, I argue that it is analytically necessary to conceptually distinguish between binary (women’s equality) and non-heteronormative gender issues (LGBTIQ+). Drawing on original survey data from the German Social Cohesion Panel (2023), I conduct a causal mediation analysis to assess how these attitudes mediate the relationship between gender and left-right self-placement among young adults. Preliminary findings indicate an asymmetrical pattern: attitudes toward binary gender issues primarily drive the ideological youth gender gap through young men’s less egalitarian stances, while attitudes toward non-heteronormative gender issues elevate it through young women’s more progressive positions. Importantly, attitudes toward other major policy areas, e.g., immigration, climate change, or economic redistribution, do not account for the ideological divergence.
These findings underscore the centrality of gender-related attitudes in shaping ideological orientations within younger cohorts. By disentangling effects of attitudes toward gender-related issues through a distinction between binary and non-heteronormative gender issues, the paper advances debates on generational change and gendered political behavior. It shows that ideological trajectories are not unidirectional but gendered: while young men increasingly drift toward less progressive orientations, young women move further in a progressive direction. In doing so, the paper contributes to understanding the roots of rightward shifts among young men and the broader polarization of gender-related attitudes in contemporary democracies.
