Will Gen Z women be decisive in 2024?

A conversation with Dr. Melissa Deckman, CEO of PRRI about her new book

With less than two weeks until the election and polls showing a tight race, Gen Z is expected to play a decisive role. While a lot of media coverage has been talking about Gen Z men (like here, here, here, here and here), Dr. Melissa Deckman, author of the new book, The Politics of Gen Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy with Columbia University Press, has plenty of evidence that tells us Gen Z women are the ones to watch. 

For GENDER GAP, Dr. Deckman and I chatted about Gen Z, and in particular Gen Z women. Our lightly edited conversation is shared below. With their distinct priorities, and deep engagement with key issues in 2024, Gen Z women may prove to be a decisive voting bloc in 2024, and beyond. 

Meredith:

Hello! Let’s start by talking about your motivation for writing this book. I found a story I had done for 538 in 2021 about “cancel culture” that I had interviewed you for, and I remember you mentioning this book being in progress at the time. So, this has obviously been in the works for quite a while. So tell me more about what motivated you to start this work.

Melissa: 

Yeah, sure. So I was struck by a survey that PRRI [Public Religion Research Institute] did back in late 2017 with MTV examining the political views of young Americans, aged 15 to 24.  What really stood out to me was the finding that young women were engaging at higher levels in politics than young men, and that was interesting because political science tells us that really well into the start of this century, men were more likely to participate in politics than women. 

Starting around  2010 or so, American women’s participation levels in politics have caught up with men, which is largely the result of women having higher levels of education and having careers that build up the sorts of civic skills that often lend themselves to more formal political engagement.

But with Gen Z, we're seeing potentially the first time that a group of women are outperforming their male counterparts in terms of political participation. So I looked at that finding and thought, “was that an outlier? Is there something going on here? And if so, what does that mean for the political future?” And so that really began this larger book project.

I also had the pleasure around the same time to do some consulting work for an organization called IGNITE, which is a nonpartisan, nonprofit group that trains young women to run for political office. They were also interested in those initial survey results and helped to fund additional research I was doing, such as  focus groups and several additional national surveys. One of those surveys, conducted in 2019 during Trump’s presidency, showed that the reverse gender gap first discovered in the 2017 PRRI survey was again replicated.

While the surveys and focus groups revealed important insights, I decided to interview young Gen Z activists as well, most of whom were political entrepreneurs forming their own youth-led organizations to share the stories of Zoomers who felt most compelled to become politically active. So the resulting book project took a little longer because I was including both interviews and focus group data, along with collecting and analyzing more survey data. 

Meredith: 

That's interesting, because right now the attention on Gen Z is about women’s and men's differences in who they're going to support in the 2024 Presidential election. But your motivation wasn't necessarily about women’s and men’s political attitudes. It was behavioral. And it's probably those behavioral differences in their engagement that precipitated some of these attitude differences we are seeing in some polling. Well, we'll wait and see if those differences emerge, right? 

Melissa: 

So I might frame it a little differently. If that's okay.

Meredith: 

Yeah, please do! 

Melissa: 

One of the things that's really interesting about Gen Z women is they have become the most staunchly liberal group of American women. Gallup, for example, last month released a longitudinal analysis, looking at self-identification in terms of ideology and they found that young women, aged 18 to 29, over the past decade have become a lot more likely to say that they're liberal and hold more progressive attitudinal positions on a range of policies. 

There is currently a narrative in the media that there's a huge gender divide, and that young women are turning far to the left. And in response, young men are becoming reactionary, becoming conservative. And I think it's actually only partially correct.

The divide that we're seeing in terms of ideology and partisanship among Gen Z women and men is real, but it is a function of Gen Z women becoming far more liberal, with Gen Z men being more ideologically diverse and reverting to the ideological average of American men more generally. So the distinct group here is Gen Z women. I think that's a really interesting political story. 

I've been looking at the youth vote for a while, and when Obama ran for President in 2008, more than two-thirds of young Americans ages 18 to 29 voted for him, and there was really no gender gap among them in terms of voting for president. But since that election, women’s levels of support for Democratic candidates has remained very high, while young men’s support has fallen somewhat. At the same time, exit polls show that a majority of young men still have preferred Democratic presidential candidates since 2008, but just not at such high levels as young women. It's just really that the trajectory of young women, who are staunchly liberal and voting more for Democrats is more pronounced, is the really unique story here.

Meredith:

Yes, this makes sense. And I think that's what other political scientists have also been saying. They are cautioning against this argument that Gen Z men are much more Republican, (or much more conservative or less progressive, socially) than other generations of men were when they were younger. Earlier you mentioned that Gallup poll, which shows that the ideology of men ages 18 to 29 is pretty flat since 1999. It's young women whose trajectory is really changing.

That said, there have been a few surveys that have shown that Gen Z men are more Republican than younger men of the past. But overall, you don’t think this is a generational shift, right? You think young men today are similar to other men? 

Melissa:

I do think again there was maybe an expectation after Obama did so well among younger men, that it was kind of signaling that young men were also more liberal, going forward. And even though Gen Z men are far more racially diverse than other generations (roughly one in two are non-white) that doesn’t mean as a whole, the group is more liberal. There's this question about whether demography is destiny in terms of newer generations of voters becoming more liberal and Democratic, and we may not  necessarily be seeing that play out with younger men. 

I think what's really going to be interesting to watch is the extent to which racial attitudes matter more than class this election cycle among young men. I think the Trump campaign this election cycle might be making some inroads with young men, and maybe some young men of color, by focusing on economic issues and by spending a lot more on advertising in places where lots of young men are hanging out, such as gaming platforms or having Trump be interviewed by popular figures such as Logan Paul or Adin Ross.

But I think young women, both white and non-white, are going to vote very heavily for Kamala Harris, this election cycle. I was really struck by the 2022 midterm elections, where exit polls show that of women aged 18 to 29, 72% voted for House Democrats. 

I think that's a direct reflection of the Dobbs decision, because we find at PRRI that young women are the most staunchly in support of legal abortion. More than other women, and more than men their age. 

Meredith: 

So you're alluding to what I want to talk about next, which are the issues that Gen Z cares about. You already mentioned abortion. And we talked a little bit about racial equality and justice. Do you think that these particular issues separate Gen Z from older men and women? Or is it mostly just Gen Z women who care about those issues?

Melissa:

In Chapter 1 of my book, I share the results of my national surveys of Gen Z Americans conducted in 2019 and 2022, right before the Dobbs decision (it went in the field a month before the news about the Roe reversal).

In both of those surveys, I’m not finding a strong rightward shift on most policy positions–it's not as though Gen. Z men have become far more conservative in their outlooks. But it's the salience that's really notable in differentiating Gen Z women and men. In my surveys, I ask Zoomers whether a range of political issues are critically important to them personally, one among many important issues, or just not that important. 

And whether it's racial equality, LGBTQ rights, women's rights, abortion, climate change, gun violence prevention – all issues that we associate with Gen Z – Gen Z women are often about 20 percentage points more likely to say that those issues are really important to them, whereas young men are like, yeah, they're important, but they're not really motivating me.  

I like to joke that Gen Z women “have the feels,” because these results show that they are so much more passionate about and more invested in these issues than many young men are by comparison. I think that fits with some research suggesting that young men are more disaffected or less in-tune to politics. 

Now, Gen Z men will  say they pay attention to politics at the same level as women do. But clearly my research is finding that for Gen Z women, many, if not most, of the political issues we think about when we think about Gen Z (climate change, gun violence prevention, equality for marginalized groups) are more salient to them.  

But the one exception is the economy, and I think there's lots of research that shows that men often, for example, when they think about voting, they'll prioritize economic issues over other things compared with women. I think young women, although they care about the economy, too, care about more social justice issues in ways that I don't think Gen Z men prioritize as much.

Meredith:

Yeah, I wonder how much it has to do with the feeling of being directly affected by some of the issues you mentioned. Where with Dobbs young women feel this has a direct and immediate impact on their life. And for men, because of expectations about gender norms where they anticipate or expect that they need to be breadwinners and providers, they are more in-tune to economic narratives, and those narratives are somewhat zero sum. If that's what is happening, it's interesting to see Gen Z men still feel that pressure, even though there's been quite a shift in expectations around gender roles for their generation.

Melissa: 

I think that's a fair takeaway. I'm a fan of Richard Reeves' work. He wrote Of Boys and Men, and his point is that there’s been really wonderful successes for young women, and new stories and new narratives that have opened up ways for them to reimagine their world, in ways their mothers and grandmothers just didn't have. But young men today, perhaps less than young women, don’t have reimagined narratives for them as women have become more successful in many walks of life. And so I think that's a really important issue to be thinking about as we move forward, what it means for society, and also what it means for our politics.

Meredith:

Yes, I love the word imagination here. And I agree that there has been such a shift with new and better media portrayals of women, and also new role models for young women. So today’s women and girls can imagine themselves in new ways, doing new things.

So, let's talk about role models. You have a great section in the book in Chapter 3 about role models and how young women are seeing different, and more, role models. What does your book tell us about that? 

Melissa:

So, I undertook a survey experiment with my good friend, Jared McDonald, a political science professor at University of Mary Washington, and we really wanted to test this idea of an AOC Effect because a lot of young women that I spoke with in my research said how much they admire New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who took the political world by storm by upsetting a high ranking Democrat in a 2018 primary and becoming, at the time, the youngest member of Congress. In the 2019 survey I conducted, we ran a survey experiment, where people are exposed to different hypothetical candidates running for state legislative office with the same bio, but varied the candidates’ race, age, and gender. So some folks are getting exposed to a young black woman running for state legislative office, a young white woman, young white man, young black man etc.

We did this to see if the candidate’s identity impacted their interest in political engagement in the near future. And we also controlled for whether the respondents felt that their gender identity was important to them.

So when you take the first cut of the analysis, and you don't consider gender identity, exposure to any of the candidates doesn’t have an effect on anticipated political engagement for either Gen Z women or Gen Z men. But once we controlled for gender identity, exposure to younger female  candidates did increase the interest in engaging in politics among young women high in gender identity. (We didn’t see an effect for young men high in gender identity).  So we found some support for what I call the AOC effect. 

Moreover, and this was a bit surprising for us, it wasn’t just exposure to the young women candidates that made Gen Z women more interested in future political engagement.  Exposure  to all  of the candidates who were not the older white guy running for state legislative office  made young women high in gender identity interested in participating. In a lot of my interviews with young women and in focus groups, especially with progressive young women, they would say “we don't need any more white guys making decisions for us.” That was a common refrain. And the experiment showed that exact same thing. Exposure to someone running for office who wasn’t an older white man got them more jazzed about politics.

One of the larger arguments I try to make in the book is that young women, both white young women and young women of color, are really committed to a more inclusive democracy. They think it's unfair that you have this older generation of largely old white guys in office, and they'd rather see a democracy that looks more like them.

Meredith:

How does young women's social media use play a role here? 

Melissa: 

The reality is that Gen Z is the first generation that produces and consumes its own news and media. They're not going to legacy media channels. And because of that, in this presidential campaign you see a bit of a shift, with Trump doing interviews with popular right-leaning shows in the manosphere that have a large audience. And Harris appeared on Call Her Daddy, to a large audience as well. 

That is a recognition that the traditional legacy media is really fracturing. Young people are not watching CNN, they're not reading the newspaper, but they are on their phones all the time. And so politicians who can effectively use other mediums have a better chance of reaching those audiences.

And I think for Gen Z women, social media is sort of the lifeblood of activism. You can talk about the pros and cons of social media, but as a tool for engaging and organizing, it's really been instrumental, by providing or giving Gen. Z women the resources to organize so effectively.

Meredith:

Alright, let’s wrap it up with some “rapid fire” questions. 

Okay – Favorite Gen Z trend?

Melissa: 

I’m fascinated by how Gen Z uses technology to circumvent traditional power structures, like disrupting abortion referendum campaigns by using dating sites to encourage other users to vote in a particular way, outside their states. I think that's smart. Gen Z is often underestimated, but that’s pretty clever. 

Meredith: 

Next: A political figure, or activist that resonates most with Gen Z. We already talked about AOC. Are there any other names?

Melissa: 

I think Maxwell Frost, the first Gen Zer elected to Congress. I think he's a rising star in the Democratic party, for young people.

Meredith:

Last one. Three words to describe Gen Z's political future.

Melissa: 

Committed to inclusivity. 

Meredith: 

Thank you Dr. Deckman for talking to me about your book, The Politics of Gen Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy with Columbia University Press. I know this topic is going to be relevant over the next two weeks and beyond. Your book (and expertise!) will provide insights to help these discussions be more productive, and encourage thoughtful engagement on this subject.