Growing Apart: Ideological Polarization between Teenage Boys and Girls

Recent surveys have shown increasing polarization between young men and women in the West. Yet, little is known about whether or how this manifests among teenagers. Drawing on a unique dataset of 130,000 Norwegian high school students (aged 15-18) interviewed in the period 1989-2023, I show that the gender gap in left-right ideology has surged over the past 10 years, reaching its highest recorded level (twice as high as among young adults). I argue that this development is driven in large part by a new wave of politically potent anti-feminism among boys. A growing percentage of boys believe that ‘gender equality has gone too far’, which is increasingly associated with right-wing identification. Employing a decomposition analysis, I estimate that the gender equality issue accounts for 40-50% of the increased polarization between boys and girls. This result does not appear to be explained by reversed causality (i.e. parties persuading long-time supporters).