Youthful Futures · Essay 9 of 12
Are Boys and Girls Growing Up in Different Worlds?
Young men and women are increasingly reporting very different views of gender and equality. The harder question is how they came to experience the same society so differently.
There is a popular story about younger generations and gender.
Each generation becomes more progressive than the one before it.
History moves forward.
The story is beginning to look messier.
A 2025 study conducted by Ipsos and the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at King's College London surveyed nearly 24,000 people across 30 countries.
On several questions about gender equality, the largest gap between men and women appeared not among older generations but among Gen Z.1
Fifty-three per cent of Gen Z women surveyed described themselves as feminists, compared with 32 per cent of Gen Z men.
Sixty per cent of Gen Z men agreed that men were being expected to do too much to support equality, compared with 38 per cent of Gen Z women.
Fifty-seven per cent of young men said efforts to promote women's equality had gone so far that they discriminated against men, compared with 36 per cent of young women.1
The following year's 29-country Ipsos research found a similar divide on the last of those questions: 57 per cent of Gen Z men agreed that women's equality had gone so far as to discriminate against men, compared with 38 per cent of Gen Z women.2
These findings do not tell us that young men around the world are becoming one thing or young women another.
The national differences are enormous.
"Gen Z" once again hides more than it reveals.
But the divergence itself deserves attention.
How can people of roughly the same age, attending the same universities and working in the same organisations come to experience gender relations so differently?
The internet is an obvious suspect.
It may also be too convenient an answer.
Young men and women can spend time in very different digital environments.
Platforms learn from tiny differences in behaviour and gradually build increasingly different feeds.
A young man who pauses on one video about male status can be offered another.
A young woman engaging with content about misogyny can receive an expanding stream of examples documenting it.
Neither feed needs to contain false information to construct a distorted sense of the whole.
If I show one person one hundred examples of women being mistreated by men and another one hundred examples of men being humiliated or dismissed by women, both may reasonably believe they are learning about society.
They are.
They are also learning from different samples of it.
We should be careful about jumping from that mechanism to causal claims.
The evidence does not justify saying algorithms created the gender divide.
Economic changes, family structures, political movements, educational differences and the changing roles of women and men all matter.
Online cultures can reflect divisions that already exist just as easily as they intensify them.
But digital environments are unusually good at organising a feeling into a worldview.
That matters during adolescence.
A young man who feels lonely, romantically unsuccessful or economically insecure can encounter an explanation saying the system has become hostile to men.
A young woman experiencing harassment or restrictions can encounter an explanation saying patriarchal structures shape much of her life.
Parts of both explanations may be true.
The danger comes when an explanation becomes total.
At the same time, offline life remains unequal.
Girls continue to perform substantially more unpaid domestic work globally. Young women make up two-thirds of young people outside education, employment and training. Women still face legal, economic and safety barriers across much of the world.3
This makes the conversation particularly difficult.
A young woman may look at measurable structural inequality and find male resentment absurd.
A young man may experience educational difficulty, loneliness or economic insecurity personally and find abstract claims about male privilege equally absurd.
Each may believe the other is refusing to recognise reality.
Perhaps the mistake is assuming there can only be one legitimate form of disadvantage at a time.
Advances for women do not require pretending every young man is thriving.
Concern for boys does not require rewriting the persistent inequality girls face.
The more interesting question is what happens if young men and women cease to see one another as potential collaborators in building a fairer world and increasingly experience the other group as the reason their own lives are difficult.
There are already signs of heightened perception of conflict. In the 2025 study, 59 per cent of Gen Z respondents across 30 countries said there was tension between men and women in their society, compared with 40 per cent of Baby Boomers.1
Maybe the challenge facing this generation is therefore not simply gender equality.
It is shared reality.
Can two people enter a conversation about gender without first having to invalidate the other's experience?
Can boys discuss loneliness without blaming women?
Can girls discuss sexism without being asked to reassure boys?
Can schools create spaces where these conversations happen before an algorithm supplies the explanation?
The internet promised to expose everyone to more perspectives.
It may also be creating environments in which people encounter enormous amounts of evidence for the perspective they already inhabit.
Young men and women have never had easier access to one another.
It would be a strange outcome if they ended up understanding one another less.