But the Survey Center has touched on these issues before, and its previous research points to three identifiable reasons why young Democratic women have developed such hostility toward men: ideology, demographics, and social media.

Start with ideology.

A generation of liberal women has been taught to understand the world, including relations between men and women, primarily through a framework of “oppressor vs. oppressed.” Men are the privileged oppressor class. Women are the oppressed class. Inequalities between the two are therefore presumed to be evidence of male power being exercised at women’s expense.

The Survey Center’s data show how thoroughly this worldview has taken hold. Sixty-six percent of Gen Z liberal women say they have personally experienced discrimination or mistreatment because of their sex, compared to just 34% of Generation Z conservative women. Liberal women of all ages are also more than twice as likely as conservative women to say that simply being a woman has made their lives more difficult, 69% to 33%.

It is certainly possible that liberal women actually encounter far more sexism than conservative women do. But an ideological difference of that magnitude strongly suggests something else is happening too. People interpret their real-world experiences through the ideological lens they have been taught to adopt.

If a woman has been taught that men constitute a privileged class that systematically disadvantages women, a bad boss, a rude date, an inconsiderate boyfriend, or an obnoxious stranger can become more than an unpleasant encounter with one man. It becomes further evidence about the nature of all men.

That brings us to demographics.

Young liberal women increasingly live without the institutions that historically put men and women into sustained, cooperative relationships with one another.

Liberals are less likely than conservatives to belong to churches and less likely to marry. Survey Center Director Daniel Cox notes that only 35% of liberals belong to a church or place of worship and only 37% are married, compared to 56% of conservatives. Marriage rates are particularly low among young women.

Marriage and religion matter here for reasons that have nothing to do with politics.

A husband is not “men.” A father is not “the patriarchy.” Neither is a brother, son, pastor, neighbor, or father coaching your child’s soccer team. Regular life among family, churches, neighborhoods, and community institutions supplies an endless stream of counterexamples to sweeping ideological claims about the opposite sex.

The fewer of those relationships people have, the easier it becomes to think of the opposite sex as an abstraction.

That is especially important because Gen Z is already unusually socially disconnected. Compared to previous generations, Gen Z teenagers were less likely to date, less likely to participate in religious life, and less likely to spend time with friends face-to-face. Gen Z women are also particularly heavy users of social media. Three-quarters use it daily, and 61% use it multiple times a day.

Which leads to the third reason: social media.

Algorithms have discovered that resentment is extremely engaging. Seventy-two percent of young women tell the Survey Center that they at least occasionally encounter social media posts in which women complain about their husbands or boyfriends. Cox notes that posts portraying husbands as lazy or incompetent routinely attract millions of views.

TikTok and Instagram do not provide a representative sample of American men.

They do not show millions of husbands getting up for work, taking children to school, walking the dog, fixing the sink, coaching Little League, caring for aging parents, or sitting on the couch watching television with their wives.

They show the cheating husband. The abusive boyfriend. The creepy stranger. The husband practicing “weaponized incompetence.” The misogynistic influencer saying something outrageous enough to go viral.

Consume enough of that material, and the algorithm creates a world in which terrible male behavior appears ubiquitous.

Unfortunately, the Democratic Party plays a role here as well. For over a decade, Democrats have purposefully stoked antagonism between young men and women for partisan gain.

Just months after Republicans retook the House in 2010, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) was accusing Republicans of waging a “war on women.” President Barack Obama wasted no time elevating this gender war, issuing a “Dear Colleague” letter to universities nationwide directing them to crack down on a completely fictional epidemic of sexual assault against women on college campuses.

To be clear, sexual assault does happen on college campuses, as it always has since campuses went coed. But there was no evidence of any rise in sexual assaults or that college women suffered higher rates of sexual assault than their non-college counterparts. If anything, the evidence showed the opposite. But college women are more likely to vote, volunteer, and give money to Democratic campaigns. 

By 2014, Democrats had built an entire message around making young women believe men were the enemy. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee poured tens of millions into competitive races in Alaska, Iowa, Montana, and Virginia, tying Republicans to sexual assault. The message didn’t stop Democrats from losing nine Senate seats on net that cycle, but they did gain ground among unmarried women compared to 2010.

Democrats have not relented on their anti-men message since. In 2024, Michelle Obama warned, “If we don’t get this election right, your wife, your daughter, your mother, we as women will become collateral damage to your rage.” And the Democratic-aligned group Vote Common Good spent millions of dollars on an ad narrated by Julia Roberts portraying a married woman secretly voting against the wishes of her domineering husband.

THE INDEPENDENT NONES

The political incentives are obvious. Convincing women that their rights, safety, and autonomy are perpetually threatened gives them a reason to vote, organize, and donate. Democrats did not invent grievance between the sexes, but for more than a decade, they have had powerful incentives to amplify those grievances and incorporate them into a political worldview in which women require protection from the Democratic Party.

Young Democratic women did not arrive at their anti-men views by accident. Ideology taught them to see men as oppressors, social isolation deprived them of counterexamples, algorithms magnified the worst behavior, and Democrats fed their fear for partisan gain. The result is a generation encouraged to turn any personal setback into outright misandry.