The old “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus” premise, that “men and women are from different worlds when it comes to relationships”, has been robustly “rebuffed”, said Eir Nolsøe in The Telegraph. “But when it comes to politics, it may no longer be such an outlandish conclusion.” In the UK, “gender is emerging” as the new political “dividing line”, particularly among younger voters.
British women are increasingly leaning left, according to a new report by the National Centre for Social Research. Recent YouGov polling also suggests that 44% of women aged 18 to 24 intend to vote Green, compared with 30% of men in the same age group. Nearly a quarter of women aged 25 to 49 intend to vote Green.
Post-Brexit shift
In the UK, women have always been more likely to vote Conservative than men – until the 2017 general election, when women suddenly became more likely to vote Labour. In 2019, support for Jeremy Corbyn among women aged 18 to 24 was nearly double Labour’s overall share of the votes. That shift “is not because women’s values have changed”, said politics professors Rosie Campbell and Rosalind Shorrocks on The Conversation. It seems “more tied to changing events”: gender differences in attitudes towards Brexit, in particular, are “a potentially more powerful explanation”.
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In the 2024 election, nearly a quarter of women aged 18 to 24 voted for the Green Party – roughly double the number of young men who voted for Reform. Yet, “predictably”, it was the young men voting Reform that “got all the attention”, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. Now, though, there’s a “growing consensus” that, as the worldviews of young men and young women become “ever more starkly polarised, the driving force behind that split is women becoming sharply more liberal, not men becoming radically more right-wing”.
One factor could be higher education: polling suggests that university graduates are more likely to support left-wing parties, and 57% of Britain’s students are female. But academics like Campbell believe “young women’s radicalisation also has a lot to do with Brexit and its unfolding consequences”, said Hinsliff. Women are “noticeably more anti-austerity and pro-Remain than men”. When “the two biggest parties fell over themselves to embrace Brexit and then to rule out big wealth taxes, these women are likely to have been pushed further and further out to the political fringe”.
‘Alienated’, young and female
“British politics is more volatile” than ever, said the BBC, with traditional party loyalties in decline. But one “clear trend” is the gender divide: in a 2025 UK Youth Poll survey of 16- to 29-year-olds, 20% of women said they were left-wing, compared with 13% of men.
We’ve had “countless opinion pieces, documentaries and dramas” about young men “moving to the populist right”, said Scarlett Maguire in The New Statesman. But at the last election, “young women moved to the populist left considerably more”. Recent elections in Germany and Portugal show similar movements; this trend is “becoming more pronounced”.
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Britain’s young women “seem to feel more alienated from their country than their male peers”, as well as “more pessimistic” and “isolated”: a 2025 Onward poll had 53% saying they feel lonely, which is “substantially more than the proportion of young men saying the same”. Young women also have “an astonishingly low net economic optimism score”. Social media consumption and even relationship status “all seem to drive” these “increasingly different political outlooks from young men and women”.
“This crucial gender divide will not only continue to shape our politics but could also alter our social fabric,” said Maguire, “as women increasingly feel they have less in common” not just “with older generations” but with “men their own age”.
Harriet Marsden is a senior staff writer and podcast panellist for The Week, covering world news and writing the weekly Global Digest newsletter. Before joining the site in 2023, she was a freelance journalist for seven years, working for The Guardian, The Times and The Independent among others, and regularly appearing on radio shows. In 2021, she was awarded the “journalist-at-large” fellowship by the Local Trust charity, and spent a year travelling independently to some of England’s most deprived areas to write about community activism. She has a master’s in international journalism from City University, and has also worked in Bolivia, Colombia and Spain.
