Are women innately Left wing?

Lessons from Germany

An audio version of this essay – read by me – is available below the paywall.

Young German women are radicalising. As John Burn-Murdoch, chief data reporter at the FT, wrote this week:

The gender gap continues to widen, but contrary to what is often assumed, young men continue to vote roughly in line with the overall population, while young women have swung very sharply left… young women’s AfD vote is significantly lower than average (14 vs 21), and leftwing vote far higher (34 vs 9). The overall story is of young Germans rejecting the established centre-right and centre-left, but while young men are shifting to both populist flanks, young women are shifting overwhelmingly to the populist left.

Not only is German politics become less stable and more extreme, it is also driving men and women apart.

I wrote an essay last year about the political importance of average psychological differences between men and women – specifically, the fact that women are more likely to tell white lies for the sake of preserving relationships, are generally more selective about who they will permit into their social networks, will often punish other women who are regarded as overly ambitious or successful (tall poppy syndrome), and tend to be maternal towards those they perceive as vulnerable.

As a result of the sudden influx of women into professions like academia and journalism in recent decades, these psychological phenomena in combination have produced what is commonly referred to as cancel culture: that is, the use of a feminine style of aggression to enforce political conformity in the workplace and other areas of public life. The reigning ideology to which we’re all asked to conform – wokeness, for want of a better term – is much more popular with women (specifically young women) and these women will often vigorously defend the ideology using tools that we are all by now familiar with: social ostracisation, name calling, rumour mongering, and other “you can’t sit with us” mean girl behaviour.

I was at pains in the last essay to emphasise that these sex differences are average ones, and I’ll keep emphasising that as we go on. There are outliers, both male and female: plenty of men who participate enthusiastically in woke cancel culture, and plenty of women who don’t.

Nevertheless, one conclusion you could draw from these observations is that women must be innately more Left wing than men. Perhaps the gender gap is explained by women’s greater sympathy for the vulnerable – in the German case, refugees and sexual minorities – combined with a preference for egalitarianism within their social networks. This theory would explain why men and women are diverging so sharply: their political preferences are fundamentally at odds.

I want to propose a subtly different explanation for what we’re seeing. Women are not more Leftist, per se. Rather, the specific variety of Leftism that is currently riding high is extremely well suited to feminine preferences. That does not mean that a new style of Right wing feminine politics couldn’t displace the current one. Nor does it mean that men and women can never be aligned on politics – really successful political movements tend to succeed because they work in both masculine and feminine registers.

These are the features of a political cause that make it attractive to someone with a typically feminine personality: