Pulling Back The Curtain: Generational Differences Among Gender Gaps In American Public Opinion

Coming off the heels of the 2024 election, there was a flurry of media coverage concerning young men and their overwhelming support for Donald Trump. In contrast, younger women overwhelmingly supported Kamala Harris for president. The claim made by the media that more young men than women voted for Donald Trump and more women than men for Kamala Harris may seem concerning at first, as it suggests that gendered differences in presidential voting are novel. However, researchers in political science and sociology have examined gender differences in politics for decades. Scholars who examine public opinion have long noted that more women vote for the Democratic candidates than men do, and that more men vote for the Republican candidate than women. As such, what evidence is there to make such a claim that those aged 18-27 in 2024, Gen-Z, men and women are uniquely different, compared to other generations of men and women? The gender gap means many things; it could refer to the lower percentage of women occupying CEO suite positions or to pay disparities between men and women. In politics, the gender gap refers to political issues where men and women differ, and the distance between them is a gender gap. The media coverage of the 2024 election was built on a body of work exploring the gender gap in presidential vote choice; however, this is not the only area where gender gaps exist in politics. In this thesis, I tested whether or not Gen Z men and women differ from other men and women in 2024 and over time. I conducted a generational analysis in 2024 comparing gender gaps across various political issues, ranging from party ID to abortion attitudes and endorsement of traditional gender roles. Furthermore, I conducted the generational analysis over time, focusing only on those aged 18 to 27, to determine whether Gen Z differs not only among Generations in 2024 but also against generational cohorts when they were the same age. I initially hypothesized that the gender gaps among Gen Z in 2024 and among 18 to 27-year-olds over time would be larger; I suspected it would not be so simple as to say Gen-Z had larger gender gaps in every issue for every analysis. I found several statistically significant and notable findings indicating that Gen Z does differ across several issues in both 2024 and among 18- to 27-year-olds over time, with sometimes smaller, sometimes larger gender gaps depending on the issue.