Our increasingly gendered politics

To say gender has become far more performative in today’s politics is hardly an understatement. While last year’s presidential election saw the Trump campaign double down on masculine tropes, his administration in 2025 is seeking public policies that reinforce gender essentialism, from a pro-natalist push that will reward mothers for having more children, to making it more difficult for transgender Americans to live openly and access necessary medical care.

A commitment to gendered hierarchies is not new among conservatives, but they become far more vocally defended in reaction to social movements that threaten them.

Take Phyllis Schlafly’s successful campaign that stopped the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, which was championed by the Second Wave women’s movement in the 1970s. Women, she insisted, did not want to trade in their “special privileges and honored status” as mothers for the “alleged advantage of working in an office or assembly line.” Most women, she argued at the time, “would rather cuddle a baby than a typewriter or factory machine.”

Once again, debates centered around the worldview that life works better when men are protectors and women fulfill their God-given role as mothers and nurturers — whether, as Trump famously said on the campaign trail last fall, women “like it or not” — have become an increasingly pronounced part of our politics.

This trend is occurring in no small part because the political parties have become far more polarized on questions about gender in response to challenges to the patriarchy that have emerged in the past decade, from the #MeToo movement, which sought to raise awareness about misogynistic and abusive behavior often faced by women and to demand greater accountability against perpetrators, to the growing acceptance of transgender Americans, and the call by some progressive activists to question the gender binary itself.

Here at PRRI, we have been asking two questions since Trump’s first election in 2016 that tap into gendered themes touching on masculinity and hierarchical gender roles:

• Do Americans agree that society has become too soft and feminine?
• Do Americans agree that society is better off when men and women stick to the jobs and tasks they are naturally suited for?

Notably, roughly four in 10 Americans agree with both sentiments, and those views haven’t really changed since the first Trump administration.

While it should come as little surprise that we find Republicans hold more conservative attitudes about gender than Democrats, the more important political story is that partisans are increasingly diverging on such views.

Republican agreement that society has become too soft and feminine jumped to 73% in late 2024 from 60% in 2016 (See Figure 1). Similarly, 55% of Republicans in early 2025 agree that society works better when men and women stay in their “natural” lanes, an increase of 11 points from 2016 (See Figure 2). Over the same period, Democrats have increasingly rejected such thinking.

It is worth pointing out, too, that party trumps sex when it comes to attitudes about gender. Overall, women do hold less traditional views about gender compared with American men, but those differences are relatively modest.

The gaps between Republican women and Democratic women — and Republican men and Democratic men — are far larger (See Figures 3 and 4). Moreover, while Republican men hold the most conservative views overall, rates of agreement by Republican women on both measures have grown at a faster rate from 2016 to today.

And although often underreported, the opposite pattern emerges among Democrats. Democratic women held the most liberal views on gender attitudes in 2016, and they have become even more liberal today on such measures. But the rate at which Democratic men have adopted more egalitarian gender attitudes has been even higher since Trump won the White House in 2016.

This growing divide among Democrats and Republicans with respect to gender views is part of a larger pattern showing partisans are increasingly sorted along ideological lines — a tendency that has only been exacerbated in the age of social media. Moreover, some evidence also suggests those views played a larger role in shaping the voting decisions of Americans in the past election than they did when Trump first won in 2016, at least among the white working class.

PRRI Director of Research Diana Orcés and I analyzed factors that predicted support for Trump among white working-class voters in 2024, replicating an analysis we first conducted in 2016. Partisanship, immigration attitudes and fears of cultural displacement by immigrants were significant drivers of support for Trump in both elections.

In 2016, we did not ask Americans if they thought society was too soft and feminine; instead, we asked Americans whether they agreed that “society seems to punish men just for acting like men,” another measure of patriarchal thinking. In 2016, however, this view failed to emerge as a significant predictor of support for Trump. In 2024, however, white working-class Americans who agreed society has become too soft and feminine were nearly five times as likely to have supported Trump in 2024, even while controlling for other factors.

The politicization of gender has increased significantly since Trump’s first election — the result of a severe backlash among conservatives in the face of more open conversations of gender fluidity, the promotion of transgender rights and the growing power of women in society and politics. Our work at PRRI shows, especially, that Christian nationalists are far more invested in maintaining a traditionally patriarchal world view — and their influence within today’s GOP has never been stronger.

As partisans on both sides become more entrenched in their views about gender, we can expect gender politics to remain a significant touchstone in American politics in the years ahead.

 

Melissa Deckman serves as CEO of Public Religion Research Institute and is author of The Politics of Gen Z.

 

This column originally appeared on her Substack and is republished here with permission. Subscribe to her original columns there as well.